#i saw something calling it “”marvel’s worst debut ever and like….

[theunstoppablekit]

all my homies hate marvel film bros hating on ms marvel

[letterboxd]

Best of Cannes 2021.

From the second woman in 74 years to win the Palme d’Or, to a truly horny collection of films, our correspondent Brian Formo presents Letterboxd’s ten highest-rated narrative features from the 2021 Festival de Cannes.

If you follow our Festiville HQ, you will have gotten a pretty solid picture of reactions to the films that premiered at Cannes this year, along with a day-to-day feeling of what it was like being there. Annually, the Cannes Film Festival is one of the biggest events in film, but the 2021 festival was more than just the 74th edition—it was the first in-person-only film festival to occur post-Covid shutdowns. That brought about some complications around testing, and ticketing, but largely things went very smoothly.

By the end of the festival, the awards became historic beyond the Covid narrative when Titane’s Julia Ducournau became only the second woman ever to win the Palme d’Or in the festival’s history. While the Cannes awards are voted on by just ten film professionals, we were curious about what the Letterboxd verdict on the ten best films was.

So here are the ten highest-rated movies (with at least 100 views) from the 2021 Festival de Cannes, according to the Letterboxd community.

The Worst Person in the World Directed by Joachim Trier, written by Trier and Eskil Vogt

Renate Reinsve took home Best Actress for The Worst Person in the World, and the film itself was the biggest crowd-pleaser of Cannes 2021. Douglas called it “a landmark rom-com… A reassuring film about the overrated nature of having your shit together, remarkable, sprightly and moving”. The Oscar Expert predicted that when more of the Letterboxd community has seen it, they will “rocket that average rating to a 4.0”. We shall see. The film, which chronicles a twenty-something’s transition into a thirty-something with equal charm and mistakes, was picked up at the festival by NEON for North America and Mubi for distribution in the UK/India.

Drive My Car Written and directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Drive My Car had the longest runtime at Cannes (one minute shy of three hours) but that didn’t affect its Letterboxd standing in the slightest. Like The Worst Person in the World, this Haruki Murakami adaptation is divided into chapters concerning a playwright, his wife, and the strange ways their work differs. Anthony called it “easily the most moving and compelling film I saw at Cannes. The extended prologue is a brilliant start to the film, so beautiful, sensual, haunting and quietly devastating. Just fantastic, followed by a slow but consistent story of guilt, reconciliation, memory and the struggle of continuing to live and create.” Hamaguchi won the Best Screenplay prize from this year’s jury.

The Souvenir Part II Written and directed by Joanna Hogg

F9 wasn’t the only sequel screening at Cannes this year. Hogg’s follow-up to The Souvenir debuted in the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs (Directors’ Fortnight) section, an independent arm of the festival. Reactions on Letterboxd are currently better than for the first film. However, your mileage with The Souvenir: Part II will likely be determined by how you felt about its predecessor, as they are perfectly constructed as bookends. It’s fitting too that its popularity follows Drive My Car, as these are two films about the artistic process (which, actually, The Worst Person in the World makes a few nods to as well). Isabel Sandoval called it “a self-reflexive marvel of rebirth and artistic invention” before stating that she “loved it more than the first”. And Iana Murray commended Hogg, writing that she “carefully unpacks her trauma and grief in a gorgeous, sensitive and surprisingly meta sequel”.

Paris, 13th District Directed by Jacques Audiard, written by Audiard, Céline Sciamma, Léa Mysius, Adrian Tomine

After making his first film set outside of France, 2018’s The Sisters Brothers, Audiard returned to Paris to make a black-and-white adaptation of Adrian Tomine’s Killing and Dying, a collection of graphic short stories. Paris, 13th District (AKA The Olympiades) follows three individuals (Noémie Merlant, Makita Samba, Lucie Zhang) looking for a meaningful connection, whose paths cross in various ways, through close interactions (as co-workers or roommates). The Cannes debut was on Bastille Day, right after the fireworks exploded by the beach, and with its electronic Rone score and a recognizable touch, it became one of the most-liked films of the fest. Mariedebarbieux wrote that “it strikes all the right emotional chords.” And Josh Golbraith loved it for being “so horny”, a major theme throughout the festival.

Titane Written and directed by Julia Ducournau

Many of the most enthusiastic Letterboxd reviews of the Palme d’Or winner come with spoiler warnings, so we’ll skip the plot outline and just quote Kevin Yang who called it “an undeniably ambitious, visually striking and slightly silly mashup of serial-killer thriller, pregnancy body horror, and found-family character drama. Titane is clearly shepherded by a unique vision, carried by an absolutely tremendous, visceral performance by Agathe Rousselle.” Though, as many of the less favorable reviews also state, like Ducournau’s last film Raw you’ll have to have a strong stomach for this ride.

Red Rocket Directed by Sean Baker, written by Baker and Chris Bergoch

Red Rocket is the lone comedy in this top ten. It follows a former LA porn star (Simon Rex) coming home to small-town Texas completely broke, and trying to set up his triumphant career revival after discovering a young girl (Suzanna Son) at the donut shop. Ethan Colburn noted that “it’s intentionally icky, but hilarious in some very dark moments”. And for Baker’s follow-up to The Florida Project, Shubhra likened it to an earlier movie of his, stating that it’s “a perfect contrast and companion to Starlet”.

A Hero Written and directed by Asghar Farhadi

Farhadi’s newest morality play tied for the Grand Prix (second place) with Compartment No. 6 (see below). This time the writer-director of A Separation treads into the social-media sphere of judgment. Because a personal debt is at stake and the lies escalate, some comparisons to Uncut Gems were made. Without bringing up that beloved movie, David Ehrlich wrote that “Farhadi plays to his strengths with A Hero, as he takes a classic premise and spins it around and around and around with enough centrifugal force to keep you rooted in place even as your sympathies fly in every conceivable direction”.

Vortex Written and directed by Gaspar Noé

At what was possibly the horniest Cannes ever, who would’ve guessed that Gaspar Noé would’ve actually been the least horny? Noé’s latest film did not play in any section at Cannes—it merely premiered on the penultimate night of the Festival. Vortex’s midnight showing and the director’s reputation did not properly prepare people for what many are calling his most earnest work, full of compassion and love. Françoise Lebrun and Dario Argento play an elderly couple stricken by dementia, and Noé uses a split screen to tell their story. Leo wrote approvingly that Vortex “made my insides turn in a calm and soothing way”. Josh called it “flawless from beginning to end … A masterpiece” but also warned that the film “is unlike anything Gaspar has ever made. If you go into it expecting another Climax or Enter the Void, you should temper your expectations.”

The French Dispatch Written and directed by Wes Anderson

The biggest and splashiest premiere at Cannes 2021 was Wes Anderson’s latest pastel pastiche, The French Dispatch. Though the film is stuffed with pretty designs, it’s worth noting that this anthology film features Anderson’s first foray into black-and-white photography since his Bottle Rocket short. The cast list is immense but those with the most screen time include Benicio Del Toro, Adrien Brody, Léa Seydoux, Tilda Swinton, Timothée Chalamet, Frances McDormand and Jeffrey Wright. The story is a series of shorts pulled from a fictional French magazine in the 1960s. Luke Hicks labelled it “a delectable, feverish whirlwind of color, design and journalistic locution bound to keep giving on repeat watches. Stories about arts and artists, poetry and politics, and tastes and smells—delivered in Wes Anderson’s singular style and accompanied by new tricks.” Florence called it “heartwarming… There is so much to look at, and so much to process, that it almost becomes a game”.

Compartment No. 6 Directed by Juho Kuosmanen

The only Cannes award winner I didn’t see, which puts it high on my watchlist. Filmlandempire fleshed out the appeal of this Finnish drama, writing that it follows “a young, coarse Russian man who strikes an unlikely friendship with a Finnish lesbian woman on board the TransSiberian. Full of underlying warmth, bittersweet, atmospheric but never romanticized; a gem!” And perhaps furthering the appeal, Simon called it “Before Sunrise with vodka!”, while Belies took things further by declaring it “​​cuter than [the] Before trilogy”.

Special mentions

Just outside of the top ten highest-rated films were a few big swings, with Best Director winner Leos Carax mixing original music with performance art and a puppet baby in Annette, Kogonada making a worthy companion to Ex Machina with After Yang, and Paul Verhoeven adding nunsploitation to his provocative filmography with Benedetta. Plus, if people swoon as hard for The Worst Person in the World as predicted, be sure to check out more of Anders Danielsen Lie in Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island. With the 74th edition of Cannes in the books, the quadruple film-festival punch of Venice, Telluride, TIFF and NYFF begins! Many of the Cannes films will screen at the last three festivals, and we’ll be watching to see how these initial ratings stand the test of other festivals.

Related content

The Letterboxd list of the ten highest-rated films out of Cannes 2021

The ten French femmes de cinéma to watch in 2021

The official list of the 46th annual Toronto International Film Festival, 2021

Follow Brian and Festiville on Letterboxd

[bamfdaddio]

X-Men Abridged: 1981 - Bonus: Avengers Annual 10/What If? 27

The X-Men, those Claremontian mutants that have sworn to protect a world that hates and fears them, are a cultural juggernaut with a long, tangled history. Want to unravel this tapestry? Then read the Abridged X-Men! [more here]

(Avengers Annual 10 & What If? 27) - by Chris Claremont and Mary Jo Duffy, Michael Golden and Jerry Bingham

Avengers? You’re not here for Avengers! Let me make the following counterpoint:

Holy eye shadow, Rogue!

See, Avengers Annual 10 is less about the Avengers and more about three other things:

The rehabilitation of Carol Danvers who, after this, has had her fill of the Avengers and becomes an honorary member of the X-Men;

Spider-Woman and the X-Men trying to figure out what has happened to Ms. Marvel;

Mystique trying to spring her Brotherhood from prison, using a secret weapon: Rogue.

Depending on my mood that day, I might name Rogue as my favourite-ever X-Man, so I really could not skip her debut issue. Instantly iconic, all of this:

Her streak;

Her signature green outfit with hoodie;

Her accent.

Queen.

I love how Claremont once again almost effortlessly introduces a strong female character, one that single-handedly takes down three of the strongest Avengers. Also note how free Rogue still is with her powers: fun, flirty, without the tragic can’t-touch-anyone-angle that will define her for the next three decades.

I’m sorry, am I getting ahead of myself?

This story begins as a whodunit: who pushed an amnesiac Carol Danvers off the Golden Gate Bridge and stole her mind? For that matter, where did she came from? Wasn’t she happily married and pregnant in some alternative dimension last time the readers saw her? Spider-Woman rescues her from the choppy water and calls Professor Xavier to help out. He manages to retrieve the Jane Doe’s identity and knows who attacked her: a woman named Rogue.

Rogue, meanwhile, skulks about the Avengers Mansion, first taking out Captain America and then attacking Thor.

Considering what this comic is about, I don’t believe Hawkeye’s throwaway mysognism is accidental here.

Rogue’s powers work as follows: through touch, she can steal other people’s powers and memories. The longer she touches someone, the longer she’ll have them - with the looming threat of the theft becoming permanent.

After absorbing Thor, Rogue is faced with three Avengers who’s powers she can’t absorb - Spider-Woman (covered in a suit); Vision (robot) and Wonder Man (being of pure energy? Idk, I’m not really familiar with him other than his bromance with Beast). Hoping the three powers she has in her arsenal - Ms. Marvel’s, Thor’s and Cap’s - will be enough, Rogue flees.

Mystique, meanwhile, has duped Iron Man by pretending to be the Wasp and has paralysed Tony Stark in his suit with some sort of device. She picks up the powered-up Rogue and their plan becomes clear:

Rogue immediately earns her place in my heart by using billionaire Tony Stark the way the Coyote uses anvils. (Also note the odd way of spelling ‘sugah’.)

I love how both the Brotherhood and the X-Men continually pull focus from the Avengers: for an Avengers-comic, it's surprising how much they're pushed to the background. Again, this makes sense if you know what this issue really is about, but that won’t become clear until the epilogue. I don’t mind, it means we get a ton of great moments, like the Blob calling Mystique ‘Misty’:

My God, this era’s Destiny/Mystique is even more obvious than 90’s Rictor/Shatterstar.

A battle erupts. One funny moment is actually seeing Destiny fight. I’ve never really read comics about this incarnation of the Brotherhood and my collection mostly takes off after Legion Quest, so I mostly know Destiny posthumously. I always figured that, as a villain, she stood somewhere off on the side, delivering cryptic messages. I never realized she was the one to almost shoot Senator Kelly, nor that her powers are this practical.

X-Men drinking game rule 11: Drink anytime someone fatshames the Blob.

The fight is pretty evenly matched until Spider-Woman releases Iron Man from Mystique’s little trap. Soon, the Avengers overwhelm the Brotherhood. While Mystique and Rogue manage to flee, Destiny, Avalanche, Pyro and the Blob are detained again.

With the main antagonists sorted, we return to the actual storyline: the rehabilitation of Ms. Marvel. Professor X has managed to tease her out of her catatonic state and offers her therapy to restore her missing memories and powers. (The ones stolen by Rogue.) The Avengers, not fully understanding why Carol won’t ask them for help, eventually come by for a house call.

Carol asks the X-Men to leave while the Avengers gingerly confront her. It’s very awkward.

“Fuck the Avengers. Taking my beer.” - Wolverine, probably.

See, what all this refers to is the rape of Ms. Marvel. I haven’t read the particular comic in which this happens (Avengers 200), so if you want all the details, I’ll refer you to this article. Before I get into the details, it’s important to note that Claremont was the writer for Carol Danvers in her solo-series, giving her agency and turning Ms. Marvel into a three-dimensional character. The title was then cancelled and Carol was shuffled off to the Avengers. (Rogue was, in fact, planned to make her debut in that the solo-Ms. Marvel series, as one of Ms. Marvel’s new antagonists. Presumably, Rogue would steal her powers there, too. We all know Claremont loves to strip his heroes and heroines of their powers to show they’re even more badass without them.)

As an Avenger, Carol was wooed by some other-dimensional dude/entity named Marcus. He courted her by giving her flowers, worshipping the ground she stepped on and, oh yeah, ‘subtly’ influencing her mind to make her fall in love with him and consequently impregnating her.

Yes.

Now, Claremont is no stranger to putting his characters through their paces and he gleefully makes use of the whole mental manipulation-trope. In fact, telepathically coercing someone to fall in love with you is absolutely what Mastermind did to Jean Grey: he probably violated her just as much as Marcus did Carol. The difference is how it’s treated in the narrative: Mastermind’s actions are never laughed away or apologized for and are the direct cause for his downfall. They help trigger Jean’s transformation to the Dark Phoenix, whose first deed is taking out her fury on ‘Jason Wyngarde’.

That’s… not what happened with Ms. Marvel. There, the narrative condones Marcus’ actions by framing it as ‘her happy ending’ (married and pregnant, yay!), something which is celebrated by the Avengers.

This is where Carol calls them out for their bullshit.

We call this ‘The Reason You Suck’-Speech. It’s a thing of beauty.

The Avengers depart, tail between their legs, and Carol hangs out with the cool X-kids from now on. For now, at least.

So, this issue is not only a landmark because it’s where Rogue debuts, but you can also see Chris Claremont going to bat for one of characters: he (presumably reluctantly) gave back the character of Carol Danvers when her solo was cancelled, proceeded to see how terribly they massacred his girl and then claimed that ownership right back.

Good for you, Claremont.

***

The “What If… the Phoenix Had Not Died”-issue is kind of boring, because it’s basically a rehash of the Phoenix Saga. Why am I paying attention to it? Because of the (mild) gore (and because the Avengers Annual wouldn’t fill a whole post). Anyway, it’s like watching a Final Destination-movie: it’s silly, light on plot and never a particularly thought-provoking movie, but it’s still fun to see all those people inventively but haplessly die.

Plot! Instead of committing suicide on the moon, the Shi’ar strip Jean of her powers after her trial. Jean is trapped in a barren mental state, almost feeling like she's a veggie. But Jean's powers refuse to remain dormant: slowly, her telepathy returns.

When Galactus threatens the Shi’ar homestead, Lilandra summons the X-Men as her champions. Jean embraces her Phoenix-side and defeats Galactus. Everyone is grateful and super-convinced Jean can handle the Phoenix this time! Yay!

And, because that battle with Galactus took a lot out of her, Jean decides she can have a little asteroid. As a treat. She keeps slipping up on her diet, supping on the occasional meteor and lonely planet to keep her power levels up. It turns out to be a slippery slope: finally, she consumes another star (in an uninhabited system! And a small one! How dare you judge her!), but when she returns to the mansion…

The absolute worst moment to forget you have powers, Kitty.

Xavier attempts to bind the Phoenix, but last time, Jean helped him fight from within. This time, there's not much Jean left. Without breaking a sweat, the Phoenix wipes his brain. But she doesn’t stop there. Maybe the Phoenix remembers that, last time, she was undone by the principles of “friendship is magic”. This time, she’s determined to not let it get so far.

It’s absolutely bone-chilling.

And the stars blinked As they watched her carefully Jealous of the way she shone - Atticus

I wonder if there’s a rhyme or reason to the way Jean murders her friends: is it random? Does she go for the ones she loves the most first? Does she save Cyclops for last, knowing killing him might trigger Jean to respond?

The narration mentions that the three remaining X-Men are the most powerful ones: Polaris, Havok and Cyclops. (I would’ve swapped in Storm for Cyclops, but whatever.) They have formulated a quick plan: Polaris pulls focus while Havok and Cyclops shift into position. Phoenix disintegrates Polaris while Havok and Scott try and blast Phoenix to smithereens.

But at the last moment, Scott can’t. Havok’s blast alone is not enough. Phoenix shoots him through the heart and then, finally, kills Cyclops. That’s when Jean resurfaces, realizing what she’s done. She can’t take it - she’s in the mood to dissolve in the sky, as per Virginia Woolf - and she lets the Phoenix take over.

Phoenix finally lives up to her potential: The End of All That Is.

It's a mediocre plot with a lame ramp-up to a terrifying conclusion. In the regular universe, the thing that triggers the Phoenix is the utter violation of Jean’s body and mind; here, it’s being confronted by Kitty. One is the proverbial red cloth in front of the bull, the other is being assaulted by an ineffective wet cloth. The Phoenix Saga is iconic because all the pieces were carefully put in place; this just feels rushed an unearned.

Also, the Watcher is full of shit. You can’t say you don’t pass judgment whilst simultaneously comparing the merits of one tragedy to the other. Shut up, Uatu.

Check back next week for your regularly scheduled X-Men Abridged! It’s time for 1982 and the brood saga!

[aion-rsa]

Best Horror TV Shows on Hulu

https://ift.tt/3k8nTTO

You thought movies were the only place to get your daily dose of horror? Oh you fool! You absolute FOOL! There are plenty of bingeworthy and scary horror TV shows out there and Hulu just happens to be a great place to find them. 

Hulu is home to recent hits like The Terror and Castle Rock but there are still more scares to be found for the horror enthusiast willing to dig deep. Gathered here are some of the best and scariest horror TV shows that Hulu has to offer.

Editor’s Note: This post is updated monthly. Bookmark this page and come back every month to see the additions to the best horror TV shows on Hulu.

Updated for October 2020

The Terror

Based on a 2007 book of the same name by Dan Simmons, The Terror season 1 tells a fictionalized account of Captain Sir John Franklin’s expedition to the arctic in 1845. In real life, the doomed men likely got lost and succumbed to the cold but the show asks “what if there was something more sinister than low temperatures lurking about?”

The Terror features a cast impressively full of “hey it’s that guy” guys like Jared Harris, Ciarán Hindis, and Tobias Menzes. It deftly turned itself into an anthology with the second season The Terror: Infamy that tells a ghost story within the setting of a Japanese interment camp in World War II.

American Horror Story

Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story is revolutionary in quite a few ways. Not only did it help usher in a renewed era of anthology storytelling on television, it also was arguably the first successful network television horror show since The X-Files.

Like all anthologies, American Horror Story has its better seasons (season 1 a.k.a. Murder House, season 2 a.k.a. Asylum, season 6 a.k.a. Roanoke) and its worse (season 3 a.k.a. Coven and season 8 a.k.a. Apocalypse). Still, for nine years and counting, American Horror Story has been one of the go-to options for TV horror fans.

Castle Rock

Stephen King properties have made their way to television before. There have been miniseries for classic King texts like The Stand and ‘Salem’s Lot and even full series for works like Rose Red and Under the Dome. Still, none of those series has had the audacity to adapt multiple aspects of the Stephen King universe itself…until Castle Rock.

Castle Rock takes multiple characters, storylines, and concepts from the vast works of Stephen King and puts them all in King’s own Castle Rock, Maine. The first season featured inmates from Shawshank prison, extended family of Jack Torrance, and maybe even a touch of the shine. The show opened itself up for more storytelling possibilities in season 2, adopting an anthology format and bringing Annie Wilkes into the fold.

The Twilight Zone

The Twilight Zone is an all-time television classic for good reason. Join Rod Serling each episode for a new tale of mystery, horror and woe.

Read more

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The Words of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Are More Relevant Than Ever

By Chris Longo

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The Twilight Zone Marathon: A History of a Holiday Tradition

By Arlen Schumer

Whatever you do, however, do NOT drop your glasses.

The Strain

The most novel thing about FX’s vampire horror thriller The Strain is how it equates the ancient fear of vampirism with the more modern, global fear of pandemic. The Strain, produced by Guillermo del Toro Chuck Hogan and based on their novel series opens with a flight landing with all of its passengers mysteriously dead.

Read more

Movies

Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the Seduction of Old School Movie Magic

By David Crow

Movies

Lake Mungo: the Lingering Mystery Behind One of Australia’s Scariest Horror Films

By Rosie Fletcher

As CDC director Ephraim Goodweather (Corey Stoll) steps in to investigate, he discovers that there might be something more sinister…and ancient afoot than a simple virus. The Strain lasted for four mostly decent seasons on FX and if nothing else helped re-embrace the vampire as a monster and not some sort of noble antihero.

Stan Against Evil

To parody horror, one needs to love horror. And Stan Against Evil creator Dana Gould really, really, really loves horror. The longtime standup comedian and comedy writer brings his unique humor sensibilities and lifelong appreciation of horror to tell the story of a quaint New Hampshire town that just happens to be built on the cursed site of a massive witch burning.

Read more

Movies

Dana Gould Picks His 5 Favorite Monster Movies

By Dana Gould

TV

Talalay’s Terrors! The Director Breaks Down Her 5 Scariest Scenes

By Kayti Burt

John C. McGinley stars as the titular Stan, a disgraced former sheriff who opts to pick up the battle against evil after a close call. He teams up with new sheriff Evie Barret (Janet Varney) to defend the town (and sometimes world) from supernatural threats.

The X-Files

The X-Files is quite simply the gold standard for horror on television. Chris Carter’s conspiracy-tinged supernatural masterpiece not only inspired every horror TV show that came after it, but just about every other TV show in general.

Read more

TV

I Still Want to Believe: Revisiting The X-Files Pilot

By Chris Longo

TV

The X-Files Revealed: The Paranormal Roots of the Pentagon’s UFO Program

By Alejandro Rojas

The X-Files follows FBI special agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) as they investigate the unusual cases that traditional law enforcement won’t touch. For 11 seasons (and a handful of movies), the show expertly balanced a massive series-long story along with what came to be called “monster of the week” self-contained tales.

Buzzfeed Unsolved: Supernatural

When it first premiered on YouTube back in 2016, Buzzfeed Unsolved became a huge hit by appealing to one of the Internet’s favorite subjects: true crime. Still Buzzfeed saw all of that success and realzied there was still another audience to serve. Thus Buzzfeed Unsolved: Supernatural was born.

Read more

Games

20 Scariest Horror Games Ever Made

By Matthew Byrd

TV

Helstrom Review (Spoiler-Free)

By Rosie Knight

In this spinoff hosts Ryan Bergara and Shane Madej examine some of the supernatural world’s biggest mysteries. With the right balance of skepticism and belief, Buzzfeed Unsolved: Supernatural is a welcome entry into the paranormal investigation TV canon.

The Outer Limits

When The Twilight Zone premiered in 1959, it set off a brief little renaissance of anthology horror storytelling on television. The best of these contenders to the Zone‘s throne was probably the sci-fi centric The Outer Limits.

Read more

Movies

How Arachnophobia Became the Perfect Creepy Crawly Horror Comedy

By Jack Beresford

Movies

Disney+ Halloween Movies for Kids: The Best Family Films to Watch This Spooky Season

By Alana Joli Abbott

Outer Limits aired from 1963 to 1965 on ABC. In that span it generated 49 spooky episodes, several of which made an impact on pop culture. Alan Moore infamously borrowed the plot of the episode “The Architects of Fear” for the ending of Watchmen. The Outer Limits received a Sci-Fi Channel revival in the ’90s and is currently poised for another bite at the apple.

Freakish

Freakish stars several high profile (at the time at least) social media stars as students at Kent High School. The kids are gathered together at school on Saturday for detention, Breakfast Club-style, when a nearby chemical plant explodes, turning the local population into mutated zombies. The group must band together to survive.

Read more

Movies

Best Horror Movies on Netflix: Scariest Films to Stream

By David Crow and 2 others

Movies

Best Horror Movies on Amazon Prime Right Now

By Alec Bojalad and 3 others

Debuting in 2016, Freakish ran for two seasons on Hulu. The show embraces its teenage soapiness and isn’t necessarily the most heavyweight horror option. But it’s a quick, fun watch for any zombie horror fan nonetheless.

The Exorcist

The Exorcist is one of the greatest horror films ever made. The Fox series that bears its name and premise isn’t quite as good (few things could ever be) but it’s still an excellent horror story in its own right.

Read more

Movies

A24 Horror Movies Ranked From Worst to Best

By David Crow and 3 others

TV

How Helstrom Became One of Marvel Television’s Last Shows Standing

By Alec Bojalad

The Exorcist is a two-season long anthology series that follows two different cases of demonic possession. In the first installment, two Catholic priests assist a woman with a possession in her home. In the second, two new priests help a young girl battle evil.

Ghost Adventures

Since the turn of the millennium, television has not been lacking for shows involving paranormal investigations. But even within the crowded spooky market, Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures stands out.

Read more

TV

Ghost Adventures: Horror at Joe Exotic Zoo Two-Hour Special Premieres Oct. 29

By Tony Sokol

Culture

How Ghost Adventures: Quarantine Came Together

By Aaron Sagers

First premiering in 2008, Ghost Adventures follows paranormal researchers Zak Bagans, Nick Groff, Aaron Goodwin, Billy Tolley, and Jay Wasley as they travel the world looking for ghoulish occurrences to investigate. Over its 200-some episodes (not including specials), Ghost Adventures has proven itself to be the gold standard for people who just want to watch some dudes stumble around old properties in night vision.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Monsterland

Since Netflix acquired the rights to Black Mirror back in 2015, the streaming world has been a veritable arms race of sci-fi and horror anthology series. Hulu has already tried its hand at horror anthology with the Blumhouse-produced Into the Dark, and Monsterland represents the latest effort.

Read more

Movies

The WNUF Halloween Special: The Making of the Most Fun Found Footage Horror Movie Ever

By Gavin Jasper

Games

How Scorn Turned the Art of H.R. Giger into a Nightmarish Horror Game World

By John Saavedra

Monsterland is based on the short story collection North American Lake Monsters: Stories by Nathan Ballingrud. It consists of eight spooky, unconnected tales and features the acting talents of Kaitlyn Dever, Bill Camp, Kelly Marie Tran, and more. The twist here is that each episode focuses on an urban legend from a different city within the United States. And given how weird this country is, the series won’t be running out of of stories anytime soon.

The post Best Horror TV Shows on Hulu appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[momo-de-avis]

Wordtober Day 18: Misfit

Presented without comment. 

----

It’s not like I’ve always wanted to be an actress, it was just something I discovered at one point, and I was already good at public speaking so—not that far a distance to travel, right?

Well, almost. Because you see, as soon as I left school and decided on following that path, I realized I was actually not that good at it. Until then, I thought a few school plays and some praise from the drama teachers was enough, but then I was thrust into the real world and found myself facing the most dreadful monster anyone in the arts will face: criticism.

And criticism said that I sucked at it.

I never really went to college, I just took it to be a stupid idea—spending thousands for three years of studying acting. It’s not like it was a medical degree, or law school—I mean, it’s not on the same level of demand, right? I just thought, a few workshops, some professional one-year courses, a few masterclasses with well-known names, and it would suffice. I read a bit on my spare time too, mostly plays, and though I tried picking up books on acting, I generally just quit after a while, bored out of my mind.

I always loved the idea of pretending to be someone else on a stage or in front of a camera, this thing about letting go of who you are entirely as you prepare for a role, and embody someone else so deeply you almost forget about yourself. I always was fascinated by method actors losing their marbles over those wacky roles they poured themselves into, body and mind. A bit morbid, yeah, but interesting. I thought I was learning more from them than I possibly could in a three-year-long university course.

So I did what I could, here and there, and after four years my resume amounted to a few masterclasses and courses that cast me aside before a fellow competitor who showed up with big university names listed alongside pompous grades. This might have been about when I realize I’d made some serious misjudgement, and a petty one at that.

Six years down the line, and I was making a living out of being an extra on random shit on the telly. A few soap operas, some historical TV shows, even talk-shows. They paid little, but at least production provided a snack, and the good thing was that I got to stand in the back, watching the crew go mad about a slight fault in equipment or what-have-you, which gave me the chance to strike up a nice chat with some pop star from the telly out there. It was fun, even educational, considering TV stars love giving you unsolicited advice when you share your wish of becoming an actor with them. But it was actually quite crushing too.

I mean, I had to listen to these people going on about never quitting, never giving up on my dreams, that it’s a cutthroat world out there, competition this and that, and everyone wants a piece of what they have—go on, fly, you little bird! Sure. But not really. I might have misjudged things and should have gone to university, definitely, but it’s not like I didn’t try. I did try. I went to casting calls nearly every week, attended lectures, all that. I just hated wasting my time with networking, the one thing everyone insisted on was absolutely a necessity, like whatever talent you might have, it won’t matter until you talk like a pompous ass.

Ten years, and the best gig I had landed was a poorly made theatre production about a little kid on the moon that was, if I am being honest, a straight-up rip-off from The Little Prince, and intended at a younger audience too, though I suspect the theatre director’s decision on casting grown adults to play little children in an almost demeaning way was the major ingredient to attracting a series of college students who had a laugh with it. The critics weren’t nice about it either, but I did my job.

There were other jobs, but they were equally bad, if not worse. This one just paid best.

Twelve years on, and I escalated to a commercial on toothpaste, where I played the fake doctor saying nine out of ten dentists went absolutely nuts over this one brand, while holding a tube of—I kid you not—bland white paste that smelled of plaster. Later on, I’d even do a fast food commercial where I had to bite into a burger riddled with needles to keep the lettuce, cheese, tomato and beef straight, and though my stardom amounted to a close-up of my nostrils and biting teeth, it took me five tries because I was terrified of being impaled in the gums.

I was frustrated, I won’t deny it. I was even ashamed of showing my resume to whoever, and for every casting call I attended, I could see the disdain on those faces sitting behind that desk—that dismissive look of a casting director as she pushed her glasses down the bridge of her nose, read my miserable career’s story and asked me questions I dreaded answering. I even auditioned for bold parts I knew I’d never get, things like proper characters on TV, the lead detective on some cop show, or the love interest in a soap opera, even standing girl showing off the prices in some quiz crap.

Nothing.

You speculate when you fail, you know. Think often that it’s you: maybe you’re ugly, you’re cursed, you don’t dress properly, you don’t talk right, you lack whatever bedazzle these people, sitting at the top, have—you just lack something. Though I had the talent, I think—I might have sucked when I first started, but I got better, and there are enough mediocre actors out there making six figures to prove talent doesn’t mean shit in this world—right? So I really could not tell why I was failing, when I tried—I tried, time and again—and I just failed and failed and failed. Fail again, fail better—Beckett was a lying twat, that’s what.

Then, one afternoon, I went into a casting call for something grand, a secondary role for a recurrent character on a major TV production, some sci-fi stuff. It seemed easy enough when I read the script and the guidelines of what they were looking for, and I didn’t really do much practising—I’m good at improvisation, I reckon, even tried it for a while, though it mostly deals with comedy and I am not funny. But outside of that, I swear I am good at improvising—so I went with it, given what I had.

And I blew it. I mean monumentally blew it. I stuttered every single line that came out of my mouth, I asked to stop and try again five times, I paced back and forth with heavy breaths, trying to put my mind in order, but everything was just scrambled inside my head like when you drop a bunch of papers on the ground and try to put them back together, and I was sweating profusely—I mean, I looked like a morning jogger on his way back home. I don’t know what happened to me, I just froze in an instant of panic like I never had before—it’s my greatest quality, I can just stand before an audience and act, audiences just do not bother me at all, I’m good like that. But that day I just… felt wrecked. I couldn’t even admit to myself I should have prepared, but I had set this goal, that if I’d manage to just improvise the right way with no proper warm-up, then that meant I was good.

But I wasn’t. I blew it bad. And I walked out of there absolutely certain I had missed on yet another major opportunity.

As I opened the door to leave, someone else was coming inside, though at first I missed it and nearly let the door smash against their face. I turned back abruptly, held the door for them, apologized and… froze.

She looked exactly like me. I mean exactly the same. Same sandy-brown skin, same heart-shaped, chubby face, same light brown hairs, slightly discoloured at the tips, same tawny lips and brown eyes, even the same freckles on the nose—just everything exactly like me.

Our eyes locked on one another and she smiled, but I was certain I was just so shaken I was beginning to imagine things, so I just went home and never thought about it again.

Eight months later, the show debuted. I didn’t have any intention of watching it, considering it reminded me of my worst failure yet, but I was just skimming through the channels that night and happened to stop there for a second to reach in and grab my water bottle, and I saw it. I saw her.

She had gotten the part, and she was on TV, playing the side-character that was to be recurrent as well, but with my face. Exactly like me in every aspect—even as she spoke, it was my voice, same precise tone and accent, same quirks to the Rs and fluctuations of the Ls—just everything. A carbon copy of myself.

I searched her online—the name, at least, was different—and was slapped with a never-ending list of websites showering her with praise. The secondary character who was stealing the show, a new star was born; the flesh, the depth, the vigour she gave this mundane woman on the screen, the unmatched talent—truly, a rising star.

I can’t express just how angry it made me feel. She looked just like me—it was impossible that nobody could see it—and it turns out, I hadn’t dreamed it, that day. The more I searched her online, the more her face showed up—everywhere, just everywhere, endless pictures of this woman who had stolen my face and my talent and now every pair of eyes in the country—the world!—was on her.

I called my mum, asked her to have a look, insisted on the similarity without ever really saying just how starkly equal we were—and she dismissed it. Laughed. What do you mean!, she screamed, amused. Tou two look nothing alike! I called a friend, asked the same—even before I could spell out my troubles, she was already showering her with praise—oh, have you seen the show?, it’s marvellous, I love her role, she just puts so much heart into it, you have to watch it! But when I pressed her, she pushed it aside—looks didn’t matter, she told me—though that wasn’t even the subject at hand—and surely, you two look nothing alike.

Yet everywhere, it was me that I saw. That woman had my face, my body, my voice—and had stolen my talent.

I tried to forget about it, kept going to casting calls—and somehow, from that moment on, it seemed my luck turned for the worst. I got struck by an unexpected sense of panic, sweating profusely and shuddering at every step, hyperventilating as if I was about to pass out, and forgot my lines. I trusted my instinct on improvisation still, but that one tool that had helped me so much in the past was suddenly useless. I became afraid of hearing the sound of rejection—no, nada, zilch, bye, you suck, choose another career—it haunted me at night and I’d wake up with tears as I thought about this woman with my face stealing my confidence.

Nobody could see it. Everyone I asked, everyone I knew, I insisted she looked exactly like me, but they couldn’t see it. They laughed it off, said I was imagining things; when I pressed, they began to walk away and frown at me with suspicion as if I was nuts; when my reason began to cloud my judgement, they showed worry, suggested I should seek help. At last one day, I screamed at mum for not daring to see it and she started crying, saying I was just jealous of her fame as I had been all my life, with my dismissive attitude towards all and any who got the things I had wanted for so long without even trying hard.

She was lying, of course. I wasn’t jealous, though I couldn’t stand their pep-talks during filming breaks, between a coffee and a cigarette, and their follow-your-dreams bullshit. But this was different. I wasn’t jealous, it was just outright unfair! She looked exactly like me, how could nobody see it? And ever since she appeared in this world, she had stolen my everything—my attention, my chances, my glow, my focus. I was a shit actress again because a random stranger with my liking simply pulled the rug from beneath my feet and reaped the profits of what I had sowed!

It got worse, of course. I started drinking to get her face off my mind, but she was all I thought about, which is incredibly bizarre because the face that popped up in my head at night, as I rolled in bed with a headache, was mine, but now I was seeing myself from the outside, as—I suppose—the world saw me, but through this heavy filter of absolute scorching hatred. Yes, I hated her; I hated her so much it was all there was on my mind; I hated her with all my might, with all my vigour, and I wanted her to go away forever so I could retrieve what she had stolen.

I mean—it was unfair! Because my mum was wrong, I tried so hard, and this broad stole my appearance, my face, my voice, my outside, and suddenly she’s being given the chance to rise to the top! I even checked her resume: she attended university, worked with a drama company for three years, did comedy improv—are you joking me? Everything I tried and failed at, everything I shoved aside because I didn’t want to waste any time—she got it? That’s what separated us, what made me a failure, and she a star—a college degree?

And I mean—what else? Did she have anything I didn’t—despite, well, clearly my appearance? Maybe she fell for that crap everyone kept telling me, in the most condescending manner possible: you have to talk to people, networking is the way to go! Just talk, like that—just hold up a glass of wine and pretend, pretend you’re just like these uptight assholes standing at the top, share a laugh at a joke you don’t understand and be all fancy to their eyes—was that it? Because there had to be something else, something else besides my appearance and my talent. Just something.

I searched for very long, so long I lost focus and was out of work, eventually. I watched her videos, her interviews, analysed her behaviour—she even had my tics! The way she bit her lip, picking at the skin, while she listened to someone talk, or how she clicked her fingernails together when she thought about a question, turning her eyes down to her lap—those were mine! I even remember seeing pink magazines going on about how cute it was that she bit the skin of her fingers before a live interview because she was nervous—seriously? I did that!

Just… everything. Everything there was to know about me now existed in this person like an unauthorized biography. She told people my life’s story, my experiences, my past—the dogs and guinea pig I had as a child, the tiny scar on my knee from when I fell on the schoolyard at eight years old, that quip about the piece of paper I burned during class at fifteen.

Even when she talked about the things that were clearly hers, there was something of me. There was this one interview where she admitted she almost didn’t go to college, and when the interviewer asked why, she said, with a coy smile and pushing a lock of her hair back—like me: oh, because I was so afraid of trying something new and being put to the test, just being put into this position where I would be forced to be critical of my own talents, and I was scared of failing. And then, she looked straight into the camera.

I swear, watching that face, sat on my couch, I swear she was looking at me; I swear that bitch knew. She knew she was talking about me, because those were my thoughts. That nervousness, that hesitation, that was me on the day I held the form in my hands to apply for drama school, but didn’t. That fear was mine. And senseless as it was, I was in the right to claim my own fears, dammit! I had stood in the rain, shaking with anticipation, and I had thrown the papers in the bin because I didn’t want to be subjected to the endless torture of being told by college professors that I sucked!

My drinking got worse, my eating habits were shit, I moved back in with my mum, and my life just generally spiralled out of control. I attended casting calls with a hangover and ruined my chances; I started bawling my eyes out in the middle of shooting a commercial for a coffee brand; I fell asleep while filming a documentary where I played an extra, and was kicked out when I started a fight with the casting director on another shooting because she complained about my lack of makeup. Everywhere I went, I was just a shadow of this woman that twinkled before the cameras like a star in the skies; I was just the shameful part of a starlet, a skeleton in a closet I didn’t even know. The evil twin, if you will.

I thought my life was over. A year passed, and my mum thought I was developing an unhealthy obsession with this woman, saying I should just walk up to a mental hospital and check myself in—no more suggestions, just blatantly saying: you’re insane. My friends stopped talking to me because, according to them, I was acting strange, unable to let go of the inane idea that some random actress who had risen to fame so quickly looked, acted and existed exactly like my carbon copy. They refused to see that she was me. They refused to acknowledge that her stories were mine. They denied any similarity—over and over again, they just told me I was batshit crazy.

So I quit. I quit my dream, my life and my passions, and I just let this person possess my everything, while dreaming of hating her so much I’d kill her if I had the chance.

And that was it. It was either me or her, but this world was not made to have the two of us in it.

I tried messaging her. Found her online, every profile I could, and pasted the exact same message on every one of them, sent privately: you stole my life. Seconds later, every single messaging system beeped: you stole my life. The exact same words I had sent her, now sent back to me. I tried again, this time typing something different: you’re pretending to be me, you scheming little bitch—and they beeped back: same message, ipsis verbis. Eventually, I slammed the keyboard, producing a string of incomprehensible jargon of just random letters, numbers and symbols—and hit enter. And the exact same string of nonsense was returned to me.

I stared at the blinking cursor for a long time, shuddering in the half-darkness of my room in dread, certain nothing about this was normal, and yet the prevailing emotion to my heart was just pure, boisterous rage. Whatever it was, whatever she was, it was clear she was keen on driving me insane, forcing me into the piths of my own madness, until all there was to my existence was my obsession with this double that had stolen my life and made a spectacle out of it—while no one believed me.

So I looked for her. It wasn’t hard to figure out where she lived, not with all the gossiping magazines stalking her to the gym, to the store, to the movies, complaining about her outfits—outfits I owned, too. It simply took a little patience, some careful watching, some geographical studying of her movements, and within two weeks, I managed to figure out where she lived by simply following her route home.

It was night when I finally decided on confronting her. She turned the street and walked ahead calmly, hands deep in her pockets, and I stalked her into an empty alleyway with barely a light on. She stopped in front of a closed door, placed her hand on it and turned around—looking straight into my eyes with a twisted, perverted smile. Then, she pushed the door open and went inside—and left it ajar for me.

The building was bare empty. I mean bare empty. Every light was off, the lift not working, no sound coming from behind any door in any hallway. No plants, no garbage bins, not even a piece of advertising flapping off some mailbox—nothing. As if nobody lived there, except her. It was so vacant, so hollow, it made me shudder, like I was walking into a trap, and were it not for my obsession on hating this woman, on setting this matter straight once and for all, I would have gotten out of there. I was shaking in terror, absolutely mortified of the idea of what I would find there—I mean, the walls were dirty, with chipped off paint, some of them riddled with old graffiti—it seriously looked stripped bare of life, and like it had been so for a very long time.

But I still went inside. Terrified of what was to come, quivering at the sight of every dancing shadow, breathing heavily, I went into that dark, hollow building, reeking of old pipes and copper, and found the only door open with light inside.

I went in, but the flat appeared abandoned as well. There was but a ratty old sofa in the middle, a broken coffee table in front of it, no TV and no electrical apparatus of any sort, just old furniture scattered about. No curtains either, just the electric lights outside shining in with ease, and it cast a faint glimmer of yellow and orange on the absolute misery that was the flat. Even as I crossed the door, a million things cracked under my soles and I saw, to my surprise, there was just rubble everywhere, pieces of old stone crumbled down, broken glass here and there and garbage. A dusty bottle in a corner, a syringe glistening beneath an old chair, cigarette butts and empty crisp packets everywhere.

She stood under a doorway, her face absolutely frozen, the traits of her that composed me barely visible under the lack of light—and I trembled at the sight. I hated her, but there was something inhuman to that woman, something out of this world. She wasn’t normal. She was not supposed to exist. She was not something someone just made happen, something that just existed, that was just… there. She was like a glitch, a malfunction that nobody set straight, and I wondered—how long had she been there? Had she been there all my life and I hadn’t noticed? Had she been watching me from afar, waiting for the right time to reveal herself in full and take over my insecurities and failures to aggrandize them and twist them to her own liking, making me the sorrowful, miserable looser on the fringe of despair?

I didn’t know what to do for a long time. All my body felt compelled to do was cry, just curl into a ball and cry, and sobbing into my clothes, bawling like a toddler, I just said: why? I wanted to tell her I hated her, I wanted to pick up a shard from the floor and stick it into her skull, I wanted to cut her and make her bleed, to watch her wither in pain and maybe even cry too—but I just teared up and shrivelled in tears.

I don’t know how long it passed, but it seemed quite long. Throughout, she didn’t move—she just stood and watched. When I finally wiped my tears and looked into her eyes, she was smiling—that same perverse smile of someone sketched into reality solely to cause you fear and horror and make you tremble in your whole existence, just someone tailored to be your very own tormentor. I hated her still, but what I felt more vividly inside my pumping heart was utter, paralyzing fear. Fear she would take over me so completely I would eventually vanish, evaporate like sand in the wind, gone into thin air, forever; until all that was left was but a faint memory of someone who might have been there once, but wasn’t anymore—until that too would be gone. And I’d be nothing but a mistake forged somewhere in the past, by two people who had sorrowfully made sex one night to produce a child, and that child would fall into oblivion, stolen from the memory of the world forever by an alien meant to mimic my very own self.

I was so terrified she would take everything away from me that was all I’d be left with: nothingness, obscurity. Worse: me. Just me. Just my failures and my life. Just a life led through a string of mistakes I had swept under a rug to pretend they had never been there and moved on with a false sense of security, terrified of starting over. I was terrified this woman, who had stolen everything that was me, was there to laugh one last laugh and take all that I had left: my broken self.

And there she was: the projection of a failed dream. Successful in all I had never been, able to overcome every step I had climbed down, clambering her way up while I kept on falling. The ideal. The past and future without so much as a hint of the present—in the flesh, through me, in my image. Laughing in scorn.

She gave a step forward, picked up a shard from the floor, twisted it in her fingers; her smile grew, white teeth glinting silver, and something daunting fell on my shoulders as I watched in silence, quivering in dread. She looked again at me with a glare, and the corners of her lips fell abruptly as she frowned and pressed the shard between her fingers.

“Is this what you want?” She asked; with one swift gesture, she pulled up her sleeve and gripped the shard. The glinting piece of glass entered her flesh, a slick, thin line of red slithered up her arm, and it thickened as the pressed deeper and deeper—eyes locked on mine—until the blood pooled on the ground beneath her.

I flinched, gasped and held onto my arm; I felt that jabbing pain too, but it was somehow sweet, and instead of warding it away, I embraced it—though the crying returned, and this time more copious than before. And when she was done, she did it again—slicing herself until the blood squirted out and her fingers were covered in red, and not a slight sense of pain to her. All I could say was one thing: stop hurting me.

She stopped, dropped the shard on the floor and walked away. For a very long time, I couldn’t move, cast over a sense of paralyzing terror so great I was afraid of opening my eyes and find things I didn’t want to see—but glad, so glad she was gone. And I knew then—somehow, I knew—she was gone for good. Gone from my life. Gone from the world.

I looked down at my arm, pulled up my sleeve, and there was a scar there, long and thin, but marked with a lump of creasy skin.

It was morning when I went home. From that day on, she ceased to exist. No more articles about her, her name wasn’t listed in any movie, and every poster ever made with her now featured someone else. When I told people her name, they didn’t recognize it.

She was just gone, as if nobody had even noticed she’d been there at all. 

And now, being the only one who remembers her, who remembers all that horrible, gnawing pain that ate up my arm that night, or that paralyzing dread of seeing my double steal from my failures, feels like being stuck inside a cage forever.

___

Past Challenges:

Wordtober Day 1: Ring

Wordtober Day 2: Mindless

Wordtober Day 3: Bait

Wordtober Day 4: Freeze

Wordtober Day 5: Build I

Wordtober Day 6: Build II

Wordtober Day 7: Enchanted (Encantada)

Wordtober Day 8: Frail

Wordtober Day 9: Swing

Wordtober Day 10: Pattern

Wordtober Day 11: Snow

(Skipped Day 12)

Wodrtober Day 13: Ash

Wordtober Day 14: Overgrown

Wordtober Day 15: Legend

Wordtober Day 16: Wild

(Skipped day 17)

[katewillaert]

My Secret Origin (Part 1): How To Fail At Comics

[Above: Art from 20 years ago, when I was in High School.]

What do you want to be when you grow up?

When I was four I said “mad scientist.” It was 1987 and I was a big fan of The Real Ghostbusters and Doc Brown. My mom insisted “mad scientist” wasn’t a profession. And weren’t those characters are inventors? What did I want to invent?

Clearly I hadn’t thought this through.

My mom also informed me that all those cartoons I watch were made by people. Those were drawings, and there are people whose job it was to draw those.

This blew my mind. From that point on I decided I was going to be an animator.

Discovering Art

I don’t remember when I first started drawing. It seems like something I always did growing up. As far as my memory is concerned, I came out of the womb holding a pencil and began drawing before I said my first words.

In reality, I probably started in preschool when I was four, just before I discovered what an animator was. I remember my favorite subject to draw was the Ecto-1 from Ghostbusters. I must’ve drawn it something like 10 or 20 times.

My mom kept almost all of my childhood art, so in theory I could figure out when I started drawing from that...except the earliest drawings were ruined when the basement flooded.

After the flooding, my mom was condensing what was left, and I saw something surprising: a box filled with Ecto-1 drawings. I hadn’t drawn it 10 or 20 times, I’d drawn it 100 or 200 times. Repetitively, over and over, without consciously thinking about what I was doing.

It was practice without realizing I was practicing. I guess that’s how my art “leveled up” so quickly?

Later I discovered other details about my early development. There was a time around age 2 where I stopped talking. There were times when I liked to line up toys. My obsession before art was Legos, building complex shapes and stairs.

Today these might be recognized as possible indicators of autism, but this was the ‘80s.

Because I was shy and lacking in social skills, a teacher suggested to my parents that I might benefit from being held back a grade. I had a summer birthday, so holding me back would make me one of the oldest rather than the youngest.

Thankfully my parents didn’t take that advice. I would’ve been miserable. Despite being the youngest in my class, I surpassed everyone in terms of scores. A CAT test says I scored “higher than 99% of all 3rd grade student in the nation in total language.” 91% in reading. 90% in math. My reading comprehension was 98% in the nation, but was brought down by my reading vocabulary which was only 72%.

Yet this new information called into question a things about myself I’d never considered. Maybe certain things suddenly made more sense? In particular, the way I don’t have interests so much as obsessions. Any time I take an interest in a topic, it leads to an obsessive amount of research.

Discovering Comics

I think the first comic I ever saw was a Chick Tract some kid showed me in Sunday School. He was surprised I’d never seen one. It must’ve hadan impact on me, because I attempted to draw a tract-style comic starring C.O.P.S. (“Fighting Crime In A Future Time”).

I didn’t discover REAL comic books until a few years later. In 1991, Terminator 2: Judgement Day marketing was in full force and I thought it looked so cool. But it was Rated R, and I was only seven. My mom spotted a couple issues of a Marvel comic adaptation (drawn by Klaus Janson), and I guess that was the compromise until it was out on video.

I attempted to illustrate a comic imitating Janson’s cram-packed panel-per-page ratio. It was an epic crossover where Michael Keaton Batman encounters a Delorean driven by a T-1000, then the Ninja Turtles show up, and maybe the Ghostbusters? I knew how to introduce characters but not how to finish a story.

At this point I was still imagining becoming an animator, even though I barely knew anything about what it involved beyond some flip books I’d done. But all that changed when I discovered the X-Men.

X-Men and Batman: The Animated Series both debuted on FOX during the fall of 1992. I was a huge fan of the Tim Burton Batman movies and I’d seen every episode of the ‘60s show when it was revived in reruns, but I didn’t know the comics existed? I didn’t even know where to find comics.

My brother and I were both really into this new X-Men thing, and my brother was given a set of X-Men comics for his birthday. I borrowed them of course, and wanted to see how the story continued. My mom showed us a book store in the mall that had comics, and then we discovered the local comic store. That started my monthly addiction.

Now age 10, I decided I no longer wanted to be an animator. Comics were my true calling. And my dream was to break in at age 16.

Learning Comics

Age 11: I went from reading just Uncanny X-Men to buying the entire X-line, thanks to and event called Age Of Apocalypse.

Age 12: I started buying Wizard magazine. The first two issues I bought included life-changing information, like that you get hired by building a portfolio and showing it to editors. There was industry news, and art tutorials by Greg Capullo. I added the magazine to my monthly buy list. An X-Men 30th anniversary special gave me the entire history of the characters, and a run-down of the key artists and writers with examples of their work. It was like a Rosetta Stone before Wikipedia.

Age 13: I started buying most of Marvel’s output thanks to an event called Heroes Reborn. I never got into the Batbooks, I guess because the art didn’t look as cool? Comics contained ads for the Joe Kubert School, which became my backup plan if I didn’t break into comics on my own. I also discovered the internet around this time.

Age 14: My first year of high school. I spent every lunch hour in the library browsing the internet, since we didn’t have a computer at home yet. I discovered several comic art forums where pros and amateurs traded tips. During the summer I attended a week long art session taught at a local college by a professor who grew up on ‘60s Marvel. There I learned I’d been using paper that was much too thin to ink on, and I learned about the importance of Jack Kirby.

Age 15: I started buying Comic Book Artist magazine. I thought it’d be about drawing tips, but instead it was filled with fascinating comics history, which became an obsession of its own.

Age 16: A year of disappointment. I knew I wasn’t at the level I needed to be to get pro work, but wasn’t sure how to get to the next level. Nowadays there are all sorts of resources I could’ve used, but back then there was no Youtube, no social media, and few books about the craft of comics.

I was now certain the Joe Kubert School was the way to go.

Changing Plans

My family took a trip to Dover, NJ to visit the Joe Kubert School campus, and it was pretty disappointing. The town didn’t feel super friendly, and the school wasn’t accredited, which raised issues in regards to getting student aid. Plus the idea of spending so much money on a non-degree.

The guy showing me around tried to sell me by pointing out that comic companies don’t care about whether you went to college, they just want to see the portfolio.

I took this to heart and decided not to go to college. I was pretty crushed at first, because I’d had this dream plan for so long, and now I was plan-less. But eventually a new plan began to form.

It was time to start doing conventions.

A startup called CrossGen had a sample script and were taking submissions at SDCC 2000, so I went there. I still felt like my work wasn’t quite ready for prime time, but i was worth a shot.

And nothing came of it, other than a cool Crossgen rejection letter in a box somewhere. None of the other publishers could be bothered to even send that.

In hindsight, I was trying to enter at maybe the worst possible time in comics history. When I first started reading comics, they were at their peak during a boom period. When the bubble burst, the industry experienced year-over-year plummeting sales with no bottom in sight. No one was hiring.

But I kept at it, hoping for a lucky break. Top Cow was impressed that I did backgrounds (lol), and suggested I send in “background samples,” but I didn’t want to go down that route. But maybe that’s what a lucky break looks like? (On the other hand, many aspiring pencillers who start as inkers or colorists get stuck there.)

The next summer I went to Chicago with a Marvel sample script. I’d just graduated from high school, so I was really hoping. This time I got a critique from an editor who had actual advice to offer, and I learned a few things. But still no one was hiring.

I thought if I just stayed home and worked on art for a year, I’d eventually come up with pages so impressive that they’d HAVE to hire me. And if it didn’t work out after a year, I’d start looking for a college.

But now I was struggling with a new problem. I suddenly hated my art. I’d heard about a few professional artists who didn’t like looking at their own art, but I was certain this was different. After all, they’re actually good.

The year passed and I accomplished nothing. Based on things I’d heard, I was nervous that college might actually price me out of comics entirely. But I didn’t know that for sure, and I was super inexperienced when it came to money, since I’d never lived on my own before.

But I kept hearing how so many people have gone to college and they all turned out okay (this was before social media and before student debt became a crisis). I was clearly having trouble moving forward on my own, and Youtube still didn’t exist, so what choice did I have?

Choosing Schools

There were only a few colleges with comic art programs back then (maybe three total?), but one of them just happened to be over here in Minnesota. Art school appealed to me because all the classes were art-focused, so I wouldn’t have to waste my time with math and other BS.

And as I humble-bragged earlier, I’m good at math. But I hated it. At one point some kids from Math League asked if I’d join the team. “‘MATH LEAGUE?’ You mean you do math for FUN??”

I hated math so much, I took harder, accelerated math courses via a local college, just so I could finish math early and spend my last years of high school wonderfully mathless. If there’d been a similar way to graduate from high school earlier, I would’ve taken it. When I realized we were all graduating regardless of how much work we put in, I stopped caring so much about grades and let an occasional B+ slip in.

When I would see classmates busy studying for their SATs or ACTs, I was so glad I didn’t have to bother with that.

But the joke was on me. Because this art school didn’t just require a portfolio review (which I was more than ready for). It also wanted ACT test results.

I remember wondering if I should study before I take it, since everyone took it so seriously in high school. But I didn’t even know how to study. It’s not a skill I’d learned, because I never needed to. So I decided to wing it.

You’ll hate me, but without studying I scored in the top 96% for English, the top 94% for Reading, the top 96% for Science...but only top 87% for Math, because I hadn’t taken a math class in three years. That brought my total down 90%..

(Later, I had to learn to study in order to pass some horrifically-taught art history classes. That teacher made me hate art history, which is ironic given how much of my own writing is focused on history.)

So I got into the school, only to discover that even structured teaching wasn’t going to solve my new art problem. During my first year I told my mom that I don’t enjoy art anymore, and she thought it might be depression. I mean, that’s plausible, losing interest in your passions?

In hindsight, I now have enough experience with real depression that I can definitively say it wasn’t that. I mean, I was occasionally depressed back then, but hating my art was unrelated. It took me years to figure out the actual problem.

Dunning Kruger

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is named after a study which found that:

1) People who aren’t knowledgeable about a skill tend to think they’re better at it than they are, because they don’t know enough to know what they don’t know.

2) Conversely, people who ARE knowledgeable about a skill tend to think they’re worse at it than they are.

My problem went one level deeper. I’d learned a shit ton about every skill related to comic art, but I hadn’t put in as much time actually practicing. And now practicing was tough, because I was hyper-aware of how bad every line was as I laid it down.

In other words, the exact reverse of when I was four and drew repetitively on auto-pilot. Back then I was oblivious that I was practicing anything at all. Now I had the benefit and detriment of a critical mind.

But this realization came later. At the time I was just miserable and didn’t know what was wrong with me.

Halfway through art school, I realized I’d likely already priced myself out of comics, and I needed a real degree that would function back-up plan. So I switched majors. Instead of a Comics major filling my electives with design classes, I became a Design major filling my electives with comics classes.

In order to change my major, I had to explain it to the head of the school. This was awkward because it partly involved explaining how the comics industry worked, and he didn’t want to believe it. He told me I was being cynical.

I tried doing comic samples one last time after college, for a convention in 2006, but couldn’t even finish a page. Then sometime around 2008, I gave up drawing entirely.

How I got started again is another story.

You can also find me on:

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/katewillaert/?hl=en

Twitter -  https://twitter.com/katewillaert

Art Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/katewillaert

History Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/acriticalhit

[sebeth]

Fantastic Four #1 - 3

Warning, Spoilers Ahead…

 Summary: The origin of the Team. The Four battle the Mole Man, Skrulls, and the Miracle Man.

Debuts:

·         The Fantastic Four

·         Reed Richards

·         Ben Grimm

·         Susan Storm

·         Johnny Storm

·         Mole Man

·         Monster Island

·         Skrulls

·         Miracle Man

Best Cover: Issue #1. The cover is iconic with the four battling a monster while in civilian clothes. It’s been paid homage to numerous times over the decades.

Points of Interest:

·         Susan’s role is limited to love interest, hostage, older sister, and domestic caretaker. Sue’s big highlight in the first three issues is tripping a Skrull.

·         Men’s infatuation with Sue begin in these issues – both Reed and Ben vie for her attention.

·         It’s easy to understand while the Four didn’t bother with secret identities. It’s not possible for Ben and Sue and Johnny are completely unsubtle while using their powers in public.

·         Johnny: “There’s only one thing in the world that interests me more than cars!” Is it girls? Nope, its his powers. But girls are a definite third place.

·         One of Susan’s biggest regrets is shown in the first issue: first she goads Ben into flying the shuttle by calling him a coward and later she refers to him as a “thing” after he transforms into his rocky self.

·         Reed is an arrogant, insensitive ass. He brushes off Ben’s legitimate concerns over the cosmic shielding, he names himself “Mister Fantastic”, he acts as if Ben is overreacting over his transformed appearance: “Ben, I’m so sick and tired of your insults…of your complaining!  I didn’t purposely cause our flight to fail!”, and comments that there is no place for a creature like the Mole Man “in our world” when a much more horribly-disfigured Ben is standing right next to him!

·         Ben is full of rage and bitterness. And its completely justified considering the horrific trauma he suffered. Ben was right in questioning the strength of the shields and suffered the worst of the team because of the shield’s weakness.

·         The Mole Man may be one of the first sympathetic villains in comics as opposed to the straight- out evil villains found in most books.

·         I’m surprised Ben didn’t burst out laughing at the Mole Man’s “woe is me” attitude.  Honestly, the Mole Man is short, pudgy, and has a huge nose.  There are worse fates – ask Ben!

·         Karl Kessel’s Human Torch series has the Four’s flight take place during the summer at the end of Johnny’s sophomore year of high school. Johnny would have been 16 years-old when he became the Human Torch. I’ve always put Susan as seven to 10 years older than Johnny. And I think there is an approximately 5-year gap between Susan and Reed.  Per my headcannon, I have Johnny at 16 years old, Susan at 26 years old, and Reed and Ben in the 31 years old range at the time of the flight.

·         Ben is the most powerful person in the Marvel Universe at this point.  Thor and the Hulk haven’t been created yet and Namor won’t make his modern appearance for a few more issues.  Sue isn’t the badass she will become and Johnny’s control/stamina is questionable.

·         It’s hard to believe the Skrulls became a galactic threat based on their first appearance.  The Skrulls were defeated because of television!

·         Reed’s punishment of the Skrulls is rather harsh! And a perfect example of Reed not considering the long-term consequences of his actions. Did he expect the Skrull-cows to be left alone? Cows are traditionally used as a source of milk or meat. Something bad was bound to happen either way. Did Reed ever meet the Skrull Kill Krew? Is he aware those Skrulls were killed and butchered and later caused the death or transformation of multiple humans?

·         Sue continues to be insensitive towards Ben. After shoving a full-face mask/helmet on him, she comments: “Here, Thing, this even makes you look glamourous!” Harsh, Sue, harsh!

·         We’re three for three when it comes to flashbacks to the rocket ship flight. Do we really need to be reminded that many times? The teams only been around for three issues!

·         Johnny begins the long-standing tradition of a Fantastic Four member saying “Screw this! I’m out of here!” by quitting in the third issue.

·         Reed worries “It’s not him I’m worried about…it’s mankind!  For what will we do…what can we do, if…if he should turn against us?!!” Calm down, Reed.  Johnny’s having a teenage hissy not plotting world domination.

·         So, the Miracle Man – skilled hypnotist or possessing actual powers?  Time to consult the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe: “The Miracle Man possessed superhuman hypnotic powers which enabled him to influence the minds of large masses of people simultaneously. Apparently, he could telepathically plant his hypnotic illusions in the minds of his victims, for they would ‘see’ the illusions without being told what to see.  The Miracle Man’s hypnotic powers even worked over television, since people watching the movie premiere on television ‘saw’ the monster model come to life as he had intended the spectators would.  The Miracle Man could not use his hypnotic powers without making eye contact with his victims either in person or over the television; hence he could not use his hypnotic powers if he was blinded.  The source of the Miracle Man’s hypnotic powers is unknown; possibly he was a mutant.”

·         The Handbook doesn’t give a definite answer to my question.  If the Miracle Man’s monster was an illusion, I would think he would craft it to be invulnerable or at least fire-proof.  The Handbook explains the Miracle Man would later learn to manipulate matter and energy from the Cheemuzwa elders and gained the Darksoul of Daimon Hellstrom!  The Miracle Man, real name unknown, would end his life as one of the many victims of Scourge.

·         I have to give Marvel credit – they have an easy out origin for any character.  Can’t be bothered to come up with a backstory for an individual’s powers – “He’s a mutant!”

·         The Miracle Man is my favorite villain of the first three issues. His over-the-top egotistical bravado had me giggling throughout the issue.

[spideycentral]

But before then, let’s get to meet and know our new superhero. On the day we sat for our roundtable interview, Tom has not turned 21 yet (his birthday is on June 1st) and he proved to be quite a charmer like Peter Parker himself. During the interview, he revealed what one thing he did to get the part: He lied about his height. Tom, who is 5’8”, added two inches to his height when he sent in his initial audition reel. “Basically, you have to do a thing called an Ident, which is where you sent in a self-tape from a script that they sent you,” he playfully recalled. “But before that, you have to give a brief summary of who you are and say how tall you are. Every actor lies so I told them I am five foot ten!”

Of course, he got the part because he deserved it. For his initial reel, after introducing himself, he did several back flips to showcase his acrobatic talent. Tom is a trained actor and dancer who made his theater debut in Billy Elliot the Musical. In 2012, his turn as the son of Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor in the terrific disaster drama The Impossible earned him wide acclaim and various awards. He has starred opposite Hollywood heavyweights Tom Hardy and Chris Hemsworth before he got the biggest role in his young career. A plum role that took him five months to get, seven auditions, two screen tests and a not-so-memorable first encounter with the iconic Spider-Man suit.

“I was cast in Civil Wars very late and basically, they decided to put me in my stunt double’s suit, who they had already been shooting with, and he was much bigger than I was!” he recalled. “So the first time I put it on, it was really like saggy and, kind of, a sad-looking Spider-Man. It wasn’t quite heroic as I would have hoped but when we got to making my movie, when we put the real suit on, it was a pretty tremendous experience.”

Earlier, he described to us his experience during the casting process.

“The casting process was really, really grueling. It was tough because it started off as a pipe dream. And then it started becoming a reality quite quickly and it suddenly became something that could possibly happen. When I realized that I was down to maybe the last 50, I became obsessed with Spider-Man like it was my life! I was like ‘This was my role, I am gonna get it, I am gonna do everything in my power to get this role’ and I searched the Internet every day, day in and day out, to find news about the casting.”

“I think I did seven auditions in total,” he added. “I did two screen tests and after my second screen test, I was told by my agents that I will find out the next day whether I got it or I hadn’t got it — and it was like a month and a half later when I found out that I got the part so it was really stressful. I was convinced that I didn’t get it but it was definitely a fun experience.”

In those five months, Tom was still able to complete three other movies! Now, if that isn’t heroic enough maybe his being named by the Guinness Book of World Records as the youngest person to ever play a Marvel superhero will convince you.  

And for someone who plays a superhero with superpowers derived from hybrid spiders, it’s somewhat ironic that he would be deathly scared of spiders himself. “I hate spiders! I hate spiders so much! When we moved to Atlanta, we were like, ‘We should get a spider and call it Peter.’ And we went to the pet shop and I left within five minutes. There’s no way I am living with a tarantula in my house!”

Instead of having a pet spider, Tom and his best friend found a Tortoise in their garden and named him Peter.

Tom could be very animated and funny when he is recalling stories. When asked what’s the scariest stunt he ever did, he told us a very funny story that sent all of us laughing in the room.

“Shouldn’t have been scary but because of the circumstances that we did it in, it was quite scary,” he began. “Basically, I have been wrapped and I went back to my trailer. I took my costume off, I put my clothes on and my best friend Harrison was there as my assistant so he had bought me two burgers and chips and I stuffed my face. I was so hungry!”

“And then,” he continued, “as I was leaving my trailer to go home, they were like, ‘Oh no, we made a mistake. We need you back on set,’ and I am like, ‘Oh, don’t worry about it, it’s fine, it’s cool.’ And then I get to the set and I was told, ‘We are gonna do this stunt with you where you are gonna nosedive off this wall.’ And I am like, ‘Huh! I just ate like a mountain of food!’ So I put this harness on, which is called a corset harness, which when tightened up, it really tightens up just around your midsection, which is the worst thing possible right now, you know, and basically, I had to sit on the edge of the Washington Monument and hold on to the left shaft and then, they’d go ‘3...2...1...’ and they’d yank me forward and I would dive down 30 feet and they would catch me on wires...”

He paused then he continued, “Umm, the stunt was safe. It was 100-percent safe. There was nothing that could have gone wrong with the stunt but the only thing that didn’t feel safe was that if you throw up in that suit, it will cover all your mouth and you wouldn’t be able to (breathe). I think you would drown, right? So I was so scared that I was gonna throw up in my mask and luckily enough I didn’t.”

While filming the movie, rumors circulated that Tom deliberately avoided seeking advice from Tobey and Andrew. He belied this during the interview and praised the two actors for what they have done to the character before.

“It was a really surreal experience for me,” he said, recalling the first time he met Andrew in person at the BAFTAs several days before our interview. “I am someone who looks up to his predecessors and he, kind of, passed on the torch. He said to me how happy he was for me and how excited he was for the movie and I expressed how excited I was with what he was doing.”

Asked if he was ready to handle the tremendous fame that would come his way when Spider-Man: Homecoming opens in theaters beginning next month, he surprised us with a thoughtful reply.

“It’s not one of those things you can really prepare for. I am just very lucky to have a very good strong family. I have a very good strong group of friends who would be the first to tell me that I am being a d*ck. It’s very easy in this industry, specially here in Hollywood, to get caught up with what I call ‘Yes’ people, people who are always like, ‘You are amazing, you’re this. You’re so fantastic, we love you, we love you!’ My parents saw one of my films the other day and my dad was like, ‘Ehhh... That was just alright.’ Thanks Dad! But you know, that’s good to have. That’s a real critic. That gives me the motivation to be like, ‘The next thing I do, you’re gonna love.’ So, it’s very good for me and I am very lucky and the more and more I go through this process, the more and more valuable I realize my friends and family are.”

Of course, no interview with actors portraying superheroes would be complete without the requisite question: “If you can have a superpower, what will it be?”

Tom replied with a rambling answer. First, he said he’d like to time travel or teleport or control time. Then he said he also would like to control water and make people explode because our bodies are made up mostly of water anyways.

This writer, sensing another funny anecdote, asked Tom how many times has he been asked the same question before and he instantly replied, “So many times!” And how many times has he answered differently? “Oh, it changes all the time,” he said laughing. “It depends on what I am doing. If I am stuck in traffic, I’d f--ing teleport.”

But what if he had the power to grant superpowers to 15 year olds, what would it be?

“Confidence,” he replied in an almost whisper-like tone. “If you give everyone confidence in themselves and believe in who they are, then you’d have the most powerful generation ever. A lack of confidence is one of the biggest hindrances ever. I’ve been through it and once you realize that you only have to impress yourself and the people that are close to you, then you can conquer the world and do whatever you want.”

[twerkstallion]

Cars 3 Review!

MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW CUT

I saw Cars 3 on June 15th at 7pm, and wrote my thoughts down after retuning home to keep my tradition on-model with my old Cars 2 review. I’m a fan, I have to review!

Three things to describe Cars 3?

Beautiful

Too short!

Whiplash

First off, let me say that Cars 3 was a success! It was nowhere near the devastatingly deterred Cars 2, although it didn’t quite match the original as I hoped either. I was a bit bored at times, and even disappointed occasionally. But mostly? It was great. I might even go see it a second time soon. It was beautifully animated, lit, and shaded. I couldn’t have enjoyed the technical aspects of the visuals more. The film packed a lot into 109 minutes, another seven or so minutes would have done it justice and served some much needed quiet or a deeper look into Cruz and McQueen’s triumphs. The whiplash is from the “FLOOR IT” pacing, by god, it almost felt like Cars 2 at times. Even though this film had a lot of things going on, it could have used more. I’m too tired to explain this. It would have honestly been much better if we had less clips and hints released! If you went in spoiler-free, you’re in for a treat!

The good: -Lightning has some really funny, heartfelt, important, and dramatic scenes and it’s all I ever wanted. -the moonlit race is beautiful! -Cruz with race exhaust is a sound I won’t soon forget! -We did end up getting a peek inside the wild imagination of Lightning McQueen once more, even if it was a brief, frightening hallucination. -the humor in the first few minutes of the film is joyous! Lightning, Bobby and Cal were an amazing team of friends! (I do wish we had seen Bobby win though!) -miss fritter’s nervous/proud/“best behavior” tv smile -Lightning’s comment about Cruz “getting to” Jackson was brilliant -funny thought: someone finally took Lightning’s tires away, stranded him on a lift, and pissed him off. This scenario was the first thing I thought of after I saw the original CARS trailer back in winter of 2006. I love how this wound up into the films. -Lightning waiting outside sterlings office after he broke the simulator was both tense and cute, like a kindergartner waiting outside the principals office as much as his whole career hinged on the following moments. -Cruz being proud of her thunder hollow trophy was precious and fitting. It’s fantastic to see a first win, and what that does for a character. -Lightning has some of his best moments when he’s talking to his best friend Mater, and his most revealing moments are during a late night homesick Skype call with his buddy. -the view from sterlings office is peak rich person -Jackson showed some insecurity and emotion towards the end and I loved that -when the racers Cruz’s age compliment her incredible debut, it set up a respectful, competitive future for Cruz and it was a relief to see

Neutral: -Sterling and Jackson were both VICIOUS in their own ways- Sterling used his power over Cruz to emotionally flatten her, and Jackson physically lashes out in his anger. Both antagonists displayed very real and very frightening male aggression. And honestly? So did Lightning. (More on that below) -Lightning’s instant knowledge of Smokey is only comprehensible if you understand that Lightning is a big history nerd. If you don’t recognize this character trait, his sudden focus on Smokey is jarring.

The bad: -I wanted to love Cruz more, but the movie doesn’t give you much to work with. (I still love her tho. Not as much as I want to but I do) -when Lightning gives up at the Florida 500, I didn’t want to be sad but I was. My stomach almost sank to the floor at the loss. The end result of the race mends this, but it doesn’t last long. -the stock photos are used with a very heavy hand, they could have put more effort into making original shots for something that would have so much screen time. -Lightning throws an absolute tantrum even when the stakes don’t seem too high, my jaw dropped even though I’ve known it’s coming for months! -Smokey was much more aloof than I expected. He’s probably just an alcoholic -too much precious screentime was used for flashbacks instead of new content, similar to one of the many errors of Cars 2. -Cruz spent way too much time being sad and I want to hug her. TELL HER SHE DID A GOOD JOB DAMMIT!! TELL HER!!!

The ugly: -The absence of Michael Keaton was so jarring I do not recall a single thing Chick Hicks said. After waiting 11 years for the return of the comedic villain, I found myself literally nearly covering my ears during his scenes. He was a complete imposter and I was shocked. -the rehashing of the Cars 1 score over and over again was a major distraction. I was looking forward to more new content for the score. -the passage of time is only explained twice in the film and it wasn’t enough. The stakes would have felt higher if the time frame for training was made clear.

The strange: -Tex ex-machina -(I’m pretty sure Tex would straight up suck McQueen’s dick is he asked) -the focus on the singer in the bar was so drawn out I had to look away out of sheer awkwardness. She just. Is a weird looking forklift. -I was trying to figure out where Rusty and Dusty were skyping from and TBH it looked like a hospital? No idea

BEST PART: when Lightning naturally fits into the roll of crew chief and he and Cruz FINALLY become partners, their teamwork is beautiful and the whole movie clicked!

WORST PART: unfortunately, I hated the scenes with Chick. I was so looking forward to them too.

Best new character: Jackson, Natalie, Cruz, and Fritter were all awesome new additions!! I loved them all. The 90 or so new racer characters were fantastic too! Worst new character: Smokey. He wasn’t very memorable. And of course sterling. I liked him as a character until the end where he tries to turn his attitude back around on Cruz. It was so sloppy lmao

#CONFIRMED: -McQueen and Sally are NOT married -cars have body odor -there is a short epilogue of snapshots -the end credits scene is just. Mater. -Lightning McQueen DOES sing… terribly -not only does Jackson Storm listen to dubstep, he BLASTS it! -TWO new marvelous McQueen nicknames: Cupcake and Stinky -does Lightning McQueen is depression? Yes. -the trailer Mack hauls is NOT soundproof by a long shot HOLY SHIT -“mackie-boy” -how many gross things does Lightning McQueen get in his mouth THIS TIME?? Stay tuned to find out!! (A lot) -McQueen says something that SOUNDS LIKE he implies he ships cruzon lmao -I forget what he named them but McQueen named his tires and it was good

Final verdict: not as good as Cars 1 but blessedly not terrible. Also sterling can suck my ass

[moviemagistrate]

2016 Movie Year in Review

All the 2016 movies I saw, ranked from worst to best, with superlatives in the end.

Notes: 

1. I apologize for some of these reviews being half-assed. I went a bit overboard with this and at a certain point just wanted to be done.

2. Thank you for reading this. Even if you don’t read it all, just pretend that you did and tell me how great I am. I love validation.

3. If you disagree with any of my reviews, please tell me, so I can explain precisely why your taste is shit. I also welcome regular discussion.

91. Diablo – In what was a recurring theme in 2016, I saw this under-the-radar Western despite its’ shitty reviews. I was never one to let critics influence my own opinion on something, and I figured that Scott (son of Clint) Eastwood’s Western debut with a supporting performance from personal-fave Walton Goggins couldn’t be that bad. Well, if it’s completely forgotten about and accomplishes nothing else (it already has been and it doesn’t), “Diablo” shows that even the majority of people can sometimes be totally, totally right.

This film is about a young Civil War veteran whose sexy wife gets kidnapped and he goes out on a journey to rescue her. Along the way, we start to realize that the motivations in the kidnapping and the rescue aren’t so simple, etc. The premise is decent and it starts out well (with one hell of an entrance for Eastwood’s character) but the longer the movie goes on, the exponentially faster it falls apart.

This is one of the most poorly-made and ineptly-written actual movies I’ve ever seen. It’s kind of like an Ed Wood flick minus the schlocky charm. None of the characters in this movie act or talk like actual human beings. It’d be surreal if it felt intentional. I’ve written better screenplays on toilet paper, and I don’t mean with a pen. The dialogue is awful and often goes nowhere, the direction is confusing, guns are shot with zero recoil (a personal trigger for me, no pun intended), the acting (even from good actors like Goggins and Danny Glover) sucks, the plot twist is retarded and obvious from a minute into the movie, and I’m willing to bet that even the catering for this film wasn’t that great either.

If Scott Eastwood wants a future in Westerns (or movies in general), I would ask/bribe/intimidate everyone who saw this film to sign a non-disclosure agreement, which shouldn’t be hard since so few people saw it. “Diablo” has nice intentions, but intentions will only get you so far when everyone involved in the creative process is so inept at their job that they make Sony/Warner Bros. executives look almost competent. It’s would all be hilarious if it wasn’t so damn dull. It feels a bit mean giving my bottom spot to a tiny, independent movie with almost no release when there’s plenty of studio-produced garbage to choose from (more on that shortly), but trust me, even in a shitty year for film like 2016, “Diablo” deserves it.

Nice cinematography, though.

90. Suicide Squad – I’m probably going to spoil parts of the movie here. I also probably won’t proofread this review after I finish writing it. I don’t care, honestly, because just thinking about the aptly-named “Suicide Squad” makes me lose the will to live.

I went into this film expecting it to be garbage even before the negative reviews started pouring in. When I heard that Warner Bros. were planning massive reshoots and rewrites to “make the movie more light-hearted”, a million red flags went up for me. It’s one thing to add in a few additional shots or lines, but WB wanted to fundamentally alter the film’s DNA, while still retaining much of the original footage. The result isn’t so much a new film but rather two films horrifically Frankensteined together, not unlike last year’s “Fantastic Four” (how’s that for a comparison?) The first half is atrocious. It’s just a series of introductions to the main cast that all feel like badly-edited music videos. EVERY. GODDMAN. SCENE in the first half of the movie has some really out-of-place popular song that is not only groan-inducing but also doesn’t fit the tone of the scene in most cases. Slipknot doesn’t even get one of these introductions (not that it matters much since he’s killed off about 10 minutes after we first meet him). His intro amounts to another character saying the funniest line of the movie; “That’s Slipknot. He can climb ANYTHING.” Whoa, watch out for this bad motherfucker.

I don’t know how much of this you can blame on the reshoots, but the plot is fundamentally retarded, as well. Putting aside the basic idea that the contingency plan for a rogue god-like superhero is just a small team of criminals with guns and melee weapons, only two of whom have actual powers, the story progression beats are just plain dumb. The main villain is an all-powerful witch that was supposed to be on the squad but escapes because the government was very lenient in looking after her. Upon being rescued, Viola Davis’ government higher-up kills her subordinates because they “didn’t have clearance” or something like that, even though it was literally their job to help her run everything. At one point, the Joker shows up, takes Harley Quinn away from the squad, only to crash and die (but not really), and she just returns a minute later. In wanting to show his trust, the soldier in charge of the Squad smashes his explosion-app phone, and allows them to leave if they want to. In the ONLY genuinely funny moment in the movie, comic relief character Captain Boomerang wordlessly gets up and leaves. In a move I will never forgive Warner Bros. for, he just returns unceremoniously a minute later (there might be a boomerang joke there, but that’s giving the script too much credit). During the climax, the Squad has a fight with the witch, during which no one even gets hurt so it feels pretty pointless, before she says to stop and tries to coax them into joining her by making them envision and promising them their greatest desires (once again wasting the character’s potential, Captain Boomerang’s is never shown).

The characters might have been the saving grace, but they are all handled incredibly poorly. Despite being “bad guys” (which they verbally remind each other and the audience throughout), they are more like quirky Guardians of the Galaxy-esque heroes, spouting quips and doing the right thing even when it’s against their supposed nature. El Diablo makes sense, as he’s trying to repent for his sins, but why do the rest of them have morals? Why, during Diablo’s story about how he accidentally killed his family, does Harley Quinn un-ironically give him a “how could you do such a monstrous thing?” reaction. What little character development any of them have feels rushed and/or forced, where by the end they are willing to sacrifice themselves for each other and calling themselves a “family” despite having only met a few hours earlier and only exchanged a few quips here and there. Where they could have made genuinely interesting characters by making the main-characters actual villainous anti-heroes who act against the government even while working for them, Warner Bros. just made them typical Marvel heroes, spouting typical Marvel quips while killing typical Marvel cannon-fodder enemies and trying to close a typical Marvel sky portal that can destroy the world or whatever it was supposed to do, except doing it all worse. It doesn’t help that Captain Boomerang, Killer Croc, Katana, and even Joker are all useless and have literally no practical purpose for being in the plot.

How do you fuck up a movie so badly that even Will Smith can’t save it? Smith is one of the few good things about this movie, basically playing his typical leading-man Will Smith persona but he’s so charismatic and likable that you can’t help but feel bad for him for being in this dreck. The rest of the cast is a mixed bag. Margot Robbie has the potential to play a good Harley Quinn, but none of her jokes work (a combination of her delivery and the awful script) and as mentioned before, she’s written to be way too sympathetic. Jai Courtney (Boomerang) had the career-first potential to be good here, but is barely used and what little comic relief he provides is squandered. Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (who I was actually looking forward to in this movie) has only like 6 lines as Killer Croc underneath all that makeup, and all of them make him sound like a black stereotype; as a favor for accomplishing the mission at the end, he asks for BET in his cell, which is a step above asking for fried chicken and grape-drank, so at least there’s that. The guy playing El Diablo is alright. The actors playing Col. Flagg and Katana are forgettable. Oscar-nominee Viola Davis is actually pretty bad as the government head of the squad, looking bored throughout and giving stilted line-deliveries while failing to be intimidating. Cara Delevingne (in her witch form) looks and talks like a particularly poorly-written Game of Thrones character, and is probably the least intimidating villain I’ve ever seen in a comic book movie. Ben Affleck is in the movie for like, a minute. That’s all there is to him.

And how can I forget Jared Leto’s performance as Joker? No seriously, how? Please tell me. He decided that playing the most famous bad guy in comic history would be to act like a Tourette-afflicted edgy teenager who rebels against his upper-class parents by shopping at Hot Topic. At least he was entertainingly cringe-worthy, unlike most of the movie, which is just the regular kind. Who knows, maybe in all that cut footage of him lies a good performance or character arc, but he seems less like a demented criminal mastermind and more like the type of person who would giggle maniacally to himself after tearing the tag off of his mattress. Also, if there’s a word for the introduction version of an anti-climax, Joker’s first appearance in the film is exactly that.

In summary, the acting ranges from decent to bad, the characters are weak, the writing is abysmal, the plot is nonsensical, the tone is all over the place, the music choices are head-drillingly irritating, the action scenes are dull to the point where I zoned out quite a bit during them, and all-in-all a movie that should’ve been stylish and cool is just drab and embarrassing. I know that director David Ayer is better than this (and that he didn’t even have any say in the final edit) and I’m sure there’s a decent cut of this film somewhere, so instead of blaming him I’m going to blame Warner Bros., a studio that gives Sony Pictures a run for their money in terms of sheer incompetency. They’re in such a hurry to catch up to Marvel that they forgot to properly set up their universe and don’t even have a clear vision for what they want to accomplish, story-wise. Say what you will about the MCU and how formulaic a lot of their movies are, but at least Kevin Feige has a vision for his series and makes it work. WB saw the less-than-ideal performance of “Batman v Superman”, panicked, and butchered Ayer’s film to try and make it appeal to as many people as possible, ultimately appealing to no one.

Hell, give Zack Snyder the reigns to the DCEU. He’s not without his flaws, but he’s the closest thing to an auteur working in superhero films today and he’s infinitely more competent in telling a story than the hacks who edited the “Suicide Squad” I saw in theaters. Who is the real Suicide Squad? Is it the team of “bad guys” in the movie? Or is it the audience who is forced to endure this piece of shit? If there is justice, it will be the executives at Warner Bros. who should be forced by shareholders to commit ritualistic suicide live on The CW following “Arrow”

Or just punched in the stomach.

89. Ghostbusters – A “Ghostbusters” reboot is the most politically divisive film of 2016. It’s things like this that make me wonder if we’ve lost our way as a culture. Why people got so up in arms over the casting is beyond me. Personally, I think that anyone who condemns or praises a film solely because of the sex of its leads should be sterilized. But for months ahead of release, I saw almost nonstop articles, Tweets, and arguments about “misogyny” and “the patriarchy” and “raped childhoods” in regards to a silly comedy about people who hunt ghosts, and I started to wonder if it was actually a bad thing that the Chinese will soon take over the West (not that the Chinese would ever allow this film to be released, because Commies are afraid of ghosts or something like that).

It should come as no surprise to anyone with the slightest bit of rationality and foresight, however, that all this controversy would amount to nothing because the film is just a dull, unimaginative slog. I was expecting the movie to be shit because writer/director Paul Feig is a hack who never should have moved past television comedies, and Sony Pictures is a major movie studio run by a bunch of chimps with Down’s Syndrome, and apparently I’m better at pattern recognition than most. But honestly, I can’t even get worked up about “Ghostbusters” because it was just so boring. It never reached the point of being offensively bad like “Suicide Squad”, but this movie doesn’t really have anything going for it either. The lead actresses are fine, and could do well if they had some decent material to work with, but they aren’t funny enough to carry a very improv-heavy feature length film by themselves. A good improvised bit can be like a nice sprinkling of cinnamon on a tasty dessert, but “Ghostbusters” felt like eating several spoonfuls of cinnamon straight from the container. This felt like a modern-day SNL sketch arduously stretched out to two hours.

The improv could have worked if the leads had actual characters to work with, but each one is given just one personality trait (Leslie Jones is scared, Kate McKinnon is koooooky, Kristen Wiig is insecure, and Melissa McCarthy is…there), and they often break their trait for their banter where they constantly try to say funny things and tell jokes, making them feel like a bad college comedy-troupe instead of actual characters. Paul Feig didn’t even bother with any character development; just one forced scene where the animosity between Wiig and McCarthy’s characters, that’s forgotten within 15 minutes, is finally brought up again in the last 5. After a point, I started to feel bad for the cast. I know that McKinnon, Wiig, and McCarthy can do better than this (and have), and even Leslie Jones (who was the worst part of the trailer but is surprisingly the only likable and believable character in the film) deserves more than what she’s given. The only somewhat funny character was the mayoral aide who privately supports the team while publically insulting and condemning them.

As with Paul Feig’s other films, the plot is thin as can be (four women team up to investigate ghosts, start their own business, and before you know it, all hell breaks loose), and it feels very disjointed, with a lot of scenes feeling like they could be put in different orders and it wouldn’t make a difference. As a result, the film fails to properly ramp up in terms of stakes and motivations. There are set-ups without payoffs, and payoffs to things that were never really set up. And of course Feig can’t shoot action or comedy for shit, to the point where even a gifted physical comic like McCarthy looks like she’s lightly swinging at air in her fight scenes. He also clearly misses the R-rating he’s had so far in his feature films, where the lack of jokes is exacerbated without the crutch of swearing to lean on. Plus, as typical of a Sony Pictures movie, there’s enough forced product placement on display to make Michael Bay blush.

The lowest points of the film are the cutesy references to the original film and cameos from the original cast, with the absolute nadir being a scene with a Bill Murray who looks like he’s wondering if it’d be faster to run away from the film set (that he was sued into being on) or to slit his own throat. This just points to a studio product that plays it so safe and close to the original that it doesn’t have any identity of its own, and funnily enough, the gender-swapping of the lead roles is the only decent idea it has to differentiate itself.

As I said before, this wasn’t terrible or painful to watch (possible because I was already detached very early in the movie, but still). I got two chuckles, one from Jones and one from Chris Hemsworth, and a handful of snorts here and there. The CGI, sets, and prop-design are all colorful and surprisingly solid. But the overall movie is just mediocre and a chore to sit through. I normally don’t write lengthy reviews for comedies because there are only so many ways to say something isn’t funny, but the 2016 “Ghostbusters” just isn’t funny, and all the controversy that was brewed up (it wouldn’t surprise me if Sony manufactured the hateful reactions to the trailers themselves to drum up publicity) ultimately led to another one of the same bland, cash-grab remakes that Hollywood has been pumping out for the last several years. Now I may be a sexist, chauvinistic white cis-het misogynist shitlord, but I think the movie-going public deserves better than this, even those dumb bitc…[REDACTED]

88. The Neon Demon - A 16-year-old girl moves to LA to become a model, and finds quick success due to her good looks (and we know she looks good because none of the other characters, including her, ever stop mentioning it), but soon after finds herself succumbing to her own hubris and the jealousy of those around her. That’s literally the entire plot of the movie, minus some of the dirty specifics. Then again, you don’t see a Nicholas Winding Refn for the plot. As can be expected from any of his post-Drive films, characters speak very obvious dialogue with remarkably long pauses, they stare off into the distance a lot (even when just looking into a mirror), jarring ultraviolence occurs, and pretty red-and-blue lighting abounds.

I found NWR’s particular brand of violent, brightly colored autism amusing up to a point, but after a while, it became increasingly grating. Part of that is that the movie as a whole just feels kind of pointless. Thematically it’s quite obvious; the modeling world exploits young women, and said women are also jealous, catty bitches (at least, that’s the impression I got from Refn). But why the fuck is this movie two hours long? So much of the film is just NWR indulging in all of his trademark filming techniques at the expense of making interesting characters. Yes, there are plenty of striking visuals with their fair share of obvious symbolism, but that’s pretty much all there is to it. Much of the movie is filmed like a modeling session or a runway show (which is probably intentional), but there comes a point where you just want to shout “YES, I GET THE GODDAMN POINT, ALREADY.” After about an hour in, I just wanted it to end and couldn’t really care about what happened next. In what seemed like an attempt to rope me back in, the last 40 minutes or so is when the twisted and violent stuff starts happening, but I was less shocked and more annoyed and disgusted by what I was seeing.

The cast is alright, I suppose. The performances from Bella Heathcote and Abbey Lee as the two models that become jealous of the main character are fun and biting. Keanu Reeves is surprisingly entertaining as a sleazy motel manager. As much as I hated that one particular scene with Jena Malone (you’ll know it when it happens), I commend her for being so committed to her performance to actually pull that scene off. Everyone else kind of just occupies that NWR character spectrum that exists somewhere between ethereal and autistic (leaning much closer to the latter in this film).

I hate it when people say the stuff I dislike about a movie is done intentionally. Was my boredom intentional? If, however, the prospect of having Nicholas Winding Refn slowly jerking himself off in your face for two hours while maintaining unblinking eye contact with synth music playing in the background sounds like your cup of tea, then “The Neon Demon” will satisfy your unusually specific fetish, you weirdo.

87. Triple 9 – Have you ever seen an urban police drama? Congrats, you’ve already seen “Triple 9”. Basically, there is a squad of crooked Atlanta cops who plan to rob a government building with some criminals in order to appease a mob wife (hammed-up by Kate Winslet in what could possibly be her first bad performance), and they aim to simultaneously stage the murder of a fellow cop across town so there would be little resistance during their robbery. There are ride-alongs, roughing up of suspects, lots of swearing, drug use, betrayals, etc. Pretty much every “gritty” urban crime movie cliché since the ‘90s is in this film, and very little of it is interesting. The movie only really comes alive during its action sequences. The opening bank robbery and mid-film raid especially are expertly crafted and are genuinely exciting. However, they (and a wonderful little cameo from Michael K. Williams) are the film’s only highlights, and the only other thing “Triple 9” is noteworthy for is having such a talented cast and wasting them on such been-there-done-that material. It’s not an ordeal to get through; it holds your attention and it’s thankfully not as edgy as I feared, but between the dull plot, lame dialogue, and unlikable, two-dimensional characters, “Triple 9” is more of a Single 5 (out of 10).

86. The Invitation – A man named Will, who looks like a cross between Jesus and Tom Hardy, brings his new girlfriend to a dinner party set up by his long-estranged ex-wife and her new husband. Things start to get weird when they begin talking a lot about a spirituality group they’re a part of, and Will’s paranoia over their strange behavior is made worse when all of his friends seem to accept it with no problem. I went into watching this movie with little to no expectations, and those expectations were steadily raised by the performances and direction, and it all got pissed away at the end. For a while, it seemed like a really good drama with a genuinely interesting exploration of grief, but without spoiling anything, in the third act it became the EXACT movie I was really hoping it wouldn’t become. I’m sure most people won’t have the problem with this movie that I did, and the good actors and Karyn Kusama’s strong directing (she expertly builds tension and creates a great sense of space) keep it going for the most part, even despite how dumb and illogical a lot of the characters are. But I was just so disappointed by the schlock it became that it just left a bad taste in my mouth. Accept this “Invitation” if you want, but I’m staying home instead.

85. Swiss Army Man – Look, I give it points for originality, but this was never going to be my kind of movie. It’s the kind of premise and cast (Paul Dano uses Daniel Radcliffe’s magical farting corpse to get back to civilization while learning about life) that seemed destined to be “baby’s first high-concept indie film”. I saw it because I wanted to give it a chance anyway, and while it’s not without its merits (a good deal of creativity, two committed performances, and plenty of visual flair), the endless grossout humor, montages, and really ham-fisted explanation of themes and character development wore me down to the point where I just didn’t care by the end. I would have liked for the movie to have a more straight-faced approach to the situation, which I think would have underlined the absurd humor present. Instead, we have the kind of ironic whimsy one would get if they saw a bunch of Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry films and completely missed the point. I also would have liked a darker and more realistic ending, one that would actually feel like a culmination of the themes of loneliness and isolation the movie wouldn’t shut the fuck up about. As you might have guessed, the tone is all over the place, too.

If you like this movie, that’s fine. But “Swiss Army Man” is certainly not 2deep4me, and if there is any point I missed in watching it, I don’t care enough to re-watch it. Someone told me that a lot the things I found annoying about this film are intentional. Well, intentionally annoying is still. Fucking. Annoying.

84. Elvis & Nixon – The premise for this movie is really neat. On a December morning in 1970, Elvis Presley strolls up to the White House to request an emergency meeting with Richard Nixon and convince the President to swear him in as an undercover agent, leading to one of the most famous photos in U.S. history. The execution: not so great. The main problem is that the actual meeting is only the last 15-or-so minutes of the movie. The lead-up involves Elvis and his manager’s efforts to actually set up the meeting with Nixon’s staff, while Nixon is hesitant about allowing it. There is way too much stuff about the manager and his family, and Nixon’s staff. It’s not a lot of screentime, but it’s stuff/people you don’t care about in the slightest and is too much by definition (no offense to Colin Hanks, but he should really stick to TV). A lot of this stuff could have been replaced by more Elvis/Nixon, or just cut out entirely, since even at 87 minutes, the film’s length is stretched out.

Luckily, the movie is saved by the outstanding talents playing the titular characters. Michael Shannon as the King and Kevin Spacey as Tricky Dick are so good that they go beyond mere caricatures and actually feel like they embody the historical figures, even if the material is rather light. Much of the movie’s focus is on Shannon’s Elvis, and he easily holds the film together, even though you wish there was more of Nixon. The meeting between the two is of course the highlight of the movie, a wonderful stranger-than-fiction moment of history that would have made a pretty good short film. Here’s hoping for an exploitation-style sequel where they team up to fight evil drug fiends, because they deserve a movie as fun and unique as they are.

83. The Little Prince – Full confession: I wrote this review a couple of months after actually seeing “The Little Prince” on Netflix and I barely remember anything about it. I remember thinking it was a nice little animated film with a nice message about not forgetting your childhood spirit and imagination and sense of wonder as you grow up. I remember thinking that the CGI animation was nothing special (it was animated in France with a modest budget, so I won’t complain), but the stop-motion sequences were pretty impressive. I remember chuckling a few times and getting the feels once or twice.

It’s alright, from what I recall, so check it out if you like. I’m sorry if you’re a big fan of “The Little Prince” and were hoping for a more in-depth and detailed review, but I genuinely had a hard time remembering stuff about this film, which (considering the film’s message and key themes) is pretty ironic.

82. Jack Reacher: Never Go Back – I was going to make a superlative at the end of this list for “most generic”, but I realized nothing came close to this Tom Cruise action thriller. This movie is so relentlessly generic that it almost feels intentional, like a satire of one of those mediocre 90’s thrillers that are shown endlessly on cable, probably as a double-feature with “U.S. Marshals”. Tom Cruise has never made a bad movie, but this is easily one of his worst ones. Typical conspiracy thriller plot from the type of shitty airport-bookstore paperback novels that boring middle-aged people enjoy (and that these movies are adapted from). Noteworthy only for the scenes with Cruise’s maybe-daughter and their dynamic, something that feels like it’s from a different movie altogether but funnily enough is the only stuff that actually works. Not terrible in any way, but this is something for a lazy Sunday afternoon or to have on in the background while you do something more interesting like ironing your clothes or vacuuming dog hair from underneath the sofa.

81. Gods of Egypt – Who would have thought that a silly fantasy movie about ancient Egyptian deities would be such a beacon for controversy the way it was prior to release? (The controversy was swiftly forgotten about, as it usually happens). Don’t get me wrong, whitewashing is certainly an issue in Hollywood, but in a film where 10-foot-tall, golden-blooded gods rule over a flat Earth consisting entirely of Egypt while Ra, the God of the Sun, rides around in a magic spaceship taking potshots at a giant space worm all day, complaining about historical inaccuracy is a bit silly. Regardless of what ancient Egyptians actually looked like, any attempt at historical realism would just be jarring and out-of-place here.

Gerard Butler and Chadwick Boseman hamming it up as the evil Set and smarmy Thoth are fun, as is Geoffrey Rush as Ra. Shame that the rest of the cast is as dull and forgettable as they are. The CGI quality is in the halfway-point between “good” and “Syfy movie-tier”. It’s not exactly convincing, but it’s pretty and colorful enough that you don’t need too much suspension of disbelief. Tonally and stylistically, the movie harkens back to those cheesy low-budget fantasy films from the 80’s (if not in budget and star-power). I particularly love how the human girl love interest is portrayed as an innocent girl-next-door-y type, but her massive, barely-contained rack is prominent in almost every frame she’s on screen.

The only major detrimental flaw (and it’s kind of a big one) is that “Gods of Egypt” feels about 20-30 minutes too long. It just doesn’t have the narrative strength or filmmaking energy to sustain its’ running time. If it was edited down (particularly the parts with the young, discount-Orlando Bloom main human character), it’d be a reasonably fun movie. Still, I appreciated “Gods of Egypt” for its goofily-sincere throwback spirit, and nothing about it was painful to watch. Not god-like, but not god-awful either.

80. High-Rise – It’s difficult for me to review a film like “High-Rise”, because while there’s a great deal I admire about the film, the overall experience just felt hollow and repetitive to me. It’s about a young doctor who moves into a fancy 1970’s London high-rise, a self-sustained building with many luxuries intended to provide equal quality of housing to all its inhabitants, where mounting tensions between tensions between the upper and lower floors eventually give way to literal class warfare (subtle). While the first half of the movie is engaging, as the doctor maneuvers through all the social groups and meets a lot of the residents, the second half where the actual fighting starts lost me pretty quickly. None of the characters behave like normal human beings, which makes it hard to be invested in their conflict. While there’s some maintenance issues and disrespect in the building, it’s not clear why they all descend into savagery so quickly. I guess it’s something we’re just supposed to accept (human nature, man), but I feel like a more prolonged slide into chaos would have helped the movie, especially since the second half is just repetitive “one side does bad shit to the other, while the doctor tries to stay out of it” nonsense.

While I don’t buy any of the characters, the cast is strong and they play these caricatures with great conviction. I actually love the aesthetics of the movie; the set design, lighting, camerawork, etc. all being very striking and creative. Director Ben Wheatley’s talent here is evident, even if I stopped caring about the material after a while. I get that this movie is intended to be satire, so a lot of my complaints about the movie could be something that someone else would enjoy because it was all intentional, man. Maybe you’ll get more out of it than I did, but to me it was just a pretty and well-acted slog.

79. Lion

White saviors

Inspirational piano-heavy music the occasionally remembers to throw in some foreign flavor

A cute kid

A solid performance from a minority actor (Dev Patel)

A former Oscar winner who cries a bunch (Nicole Kidman)

A well-intentioned but kind of condescending depiction of another culture

Over-reliance on fish-out-of-water humor

Really obvious plot beats and recurring elements

An attempt to depict “realism” in poverty but watering it down for a PG-13 rating,

A happy/emotional ending

“Based on a true story”

Ending text that not only says what happened to the real-life figures with photos and video, but also includes a statistic about missing children in India and how this film is helping to fix the problem while a pop song by Sia plays.

I know this was based on a true story, but it’s like the fucking Academy themselves made this movie.

78. Independence Day: Resurgence – Roland Emmerich is like a more boring Michael Bay. Many of his films are little more than special effects showcases, dragged down by stock characters and awful writing. Oftentimes, the stupidity on display in a Roland Emmerich movie goes past the point of fun and becomes downright insulting to the audience. Charitably put, the man’s kind of a hack., but even a broken hack is right twice a career (sort of). The first time was 1996’s “Independence Day”, one of the most famous movies of the 90’s and a fun piece of cheese in its own right. The second time was 2016’s long-awaited (by nobody) “Independence Day: Resurgence”*. I don’t wish to imply that “Revengeance” is high-art or anything, but if you’re in the right frame of mind, it’s a simple and comfortably enjoyable flick.

A big part of that is that it’s never insultingly stupid. It’s not smart or anything, but it goes about its business without giving anyone a headache. The characters aren’t deep, but they’re likable enough for the audience to enjoy following them and for possibly the first time in Emmerich’s career, they’re not irritating. “Revolutions” is sincere in its goal to entertain, and displays enough self-awareness to get the audience to relax, like when Jeff Goldblum cheekily comments “They like to get the landmarks” during the film’s main destruction sequence. There’s also some hilariously goofy dialogue like “The ship will touch down over the Atlantic.” --> “Which part?” --> “ALL of it.” There’s a little bit of Chinese pandering (including that juice-box filled with milk or some shit that I keep seeing in these movies), but not enough to annoy, and weirdly it suits the theme of different nationalities banding together.

The cast is fine, but really nothing special. Goldblum is enjoyable because he seems constantly aware of the kind of schlock he’s in, but “Regurgitation” is sorely missing Will Smith, who is more charismatic than all the new cast members combined. When Bill Pullman is giving the best performance, your film isn’t going to win any acting awards. One other thing that I personally really missed was David Arnold, whose score for the 1996 film is one of my favorite film scores of that decade, and the only time the soundtrack for this one comes alive is when it occasionally reprises his majestic themes.

In summary, if you’re looking for something original or high-brow, look elsewhere, but if you just want to kill a few hours and seeing a diverse** group of attractive, multinational humans band together to fight aliens warms your heart a little bit in these cynical times, then “Independence Day: Redemption” will scratch that particular itch.

* I also admit to enjoying “White House Down”

**by diverse I mean black, white, Chinese, and Jeff Goldblum.

77. X-Men: Apocalypse - There's a bit in "X-Men: Apocalypse" where the younger characters go see "Return of the Jedi" and one of them comments on how the third movie of the trilogy is always the worst.

How prophetic that line turned out to be.

Not that X-Men: Apocalypse is a bad movie, but it’s definitely closer to Brett Ratner’s “X-Men: The Last Stand” than it is to Bryan Singer’s previously strong entries in the franchise. This is definitely one of those “you take the good with the bad” situations. This is a really inconsistent (tonally and otherwise) movie, so instead of writing a repetitive “this is good, but this isn’t” review, I’ll just list off the positives and negatives and leave it up to you to decide if it’s worth watching or not. This will include some spoilers, but you’re not missing much and the canon in these movies is a complete mess anyway. I’ll say that I was entertained, sometimes genuinely and sometimes ironically, for most of the film, so take that how you will.

The Good:

Evan Peters’ Quicksilver, who steals the second X-Men movie in a row

The Quicksilver mansion scene

Nice visuals

Good soundtrack

The early scenes in Poland

The Wolverine cameo

The Bad:

Nightcrawler being wasted despite being one of the best parts of Singer’s “X2”

Jennifer Lawrence is clearly phoning it in

The film does nothing fun with the 1980s setting

Oscar Isaac is wasted on a generic “I’m going to destroy the world and only the strong shall remain” villain.

Storm joins Apocalypse’s gang for like no reason, then switches sides pretty abruptly during the climax

Olivia Munn’s Psylocke has like, one or two lines the whole movie

For the third movie in a row, Magneto becomes the bad guy because he’s Magneto

For the third movie in a row, Professor X gives Magneto the “You don’t have to do this, there is still good in you” speech.

I know it’s the key theme of the franchise, but to hear these characters complain about mutant rights and discrimination is getting tiring after so many movies

It’s two-and-a-half hours long

The Funny:

Nightcrawler’s makeup

Everyone in the movie keeps saying how important Mystique is when this is the most useless and unnecessary her character has ever been.

After killing like, millions of people during the climax, they just let Magneto go, with Professor X telling him “I’ll see you around, old friend”

The characters are 20 years older than they were in “X-Men: First Class”, but all still look like they’re in their 20s or early 30’s.

That scene where Professor X beats up Apocalypse in his mind

Coca-Cola product placement

Magneto destroying Auschwitz

76. The Finest Hours – “The Finest Hours” is a period disaster/rescue drama about a small 1950’s Cape Cod Coast Guard team’s attempts to rescue the crew of an oil tanker after their ship gets Titanic’d by a major storm, and it’s as old-fashioned a movie as it gets, even to a fault. It’s a refreshingly straightforward film. I liked the community/teamwork-focused buildup, as we get to know Chris Pine’s Coast Guardsman, his love interest, and the crew of the ship before the disaster hits. I liked the scenes on the water the most, the experience of them struggling to clear the huge waves during the heavy weather is actually pretty harrowing. I liked the warm tone and the understated heroism.

There’s really not much to this film. I feel like it’s a bit too safe and predictable and not as white-knuckle exciting as I’d hoped. I wasn’t a fan of how the movie kept cutting back to the generic worries of the people on the shore, and the only things in this film thicker than the nostalgia ah the faahkin New England ahhccents. Still, I enjoyed it. It’s not a first-rate vessel, but it stays afloat.

75. Warcraft – I’ll start this by saying that I’m not a Warcraft fan and have never played any of the games. With that out of the way…

"Warcraft" is the nerdiest movie I think I've ever seen. It was so geeky, I felt like watching and enjoying it gave me my virginity back. This movie was made for Warcraft fans and literally nobody else (maybe the Chinese, but they're an easy-to-please bunch).

I actually really admire that. In an age where almost all blockbusters are watered-down, homogenized garbage made by people who seek maximum profit by catering to the largest possible demographic, seeing Universal Pictures take such a risk and sinking $160 million (plus marketing) into a film so niche and nerdy warms my heart. A movie that tries to please everybody pleases nobody in particular, and I'm happy for the Warcraft nerds for having their own cinematic moment.

The movie itself is kind of a mess, however. Even putting aside the stuff you probably need to be a WC fan to understand, the pacing is wonky, the script is weak, most of the human cast is bland, the editing sucks, and it ends very anticlimactically. While Duncan Jones (who is the main reason I saw this movie) pulls off some impressive visuals and great moments, the movie for the most part lacks the epic feel you’d expect in a big-budget fantasy movie. I was able to follow the basic story, but I was definitely lost at times, and remembered like, 3 or 4 of the characters’ names by the time the movie ended.

“Warcraft” certainly has its positives, however. While most of the human cast is underwritten or boring, Travis Fimmel and Ben Foster are both quite good in their roles, easily standing out from their cardboard cut-out castmates. The orcs won the lottery on their actors, all of whom play the orcs with such conviction that they feel more believable than most of their human counterparts. Even the writing was better during the orc scenes, weirdly. Speaking of believable, the special effects on display are fantastic. Between the amazing-looking orcs, the magic effects and the scenery, the CG artists have definitely earned their paychecks on this one. The battle scenes were fun, and (THANK GOD) shot clearly without using shaky-cam or fast editing, those two errant turds on the delicious pie of most action films. It’s also nice to see a movie that seems like it was created out of love and affection by people who actually care for the franchise, and who don’t feel the need to make it ironic or quippy.

While I mentioned that the writing is weak (most characters are frustratingly undeveloped and there are lots of important-sounding proper nouns that left me scratching my head), I see plenty of room for improvement, and with more refinement and focus, I can see a great sequel arising from this. I genuinely hope this franchise continues, because even though it’s not my thing and certainly not without its weaknesses, I enjoyed it for the most part and it feels like such a refreshing medicine to the disease of bland, corporate modern blockbusters that I don’t mind the odd taste or that the spoon is made from frozen fanboy wank.

74. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows – I admit to being one of the few people that liked the Michael Bay-produced 2014 TMNT reboot, so I was also one of the few people looking forward to this year’s generically-subtitled sequel. I’m happy to say that as incremental as it may be, OOTS is a definite improvement. It feels less like the factory-assembled reboot typical of Hollywood attempts to cash in on nostalgic properties, and feels more in line with the original cartoon series. No longer is charisma-vacuum Megan Fox the main character; she is relegated to supporting duties, and the turtles (still enthusiastically played by their mo-cap actors) take center stage. This movie does the typical sequel thing where it includes more villains than the first, but all of them (besides Shredder, who is little more than a cameo) are surprisingly entertaining and never outstay their welcome. Tyler Perry is delightful as a mad scientist, as are the two guys who play man-beasts Bebop and Rocksteady. “Arrow” star Stephen Amell is clearly having a blast as vigilante Casey Jones. The action sequences are creative and fun to watch.

There’s plenty of product placement, but the Turtles have always been whores designed to sell merchandise, so it doesn’t feel out of place. I miss Brian Tyler’s bombastic music from the first film, the score here by Steve Jablonsky being much more generic and forgettable. The few attempts at character development are trite and unnecessary. The writing is still kinda crappy, and there’s a bit too much juvenile humor. I suppose my biggest complaint is that while the filmmaking is competent, it really lacks the sort of energy and inspiration to take it to the next level. Almost all the elements for a genuinely good Turtles movie are here; it just needs someone to put it all together into something that’s more than the sum of its parts, and not the dude who directed “Earth to Echo” (I’d heard of it either).

73. Zootopia – Nice animation, great attention to detail and some good visual gags (the population-counter on the rabbit farm, the wolf cop going undercover, etc.). Highlight of the film was the opening school-play scene. Nice message for the kids about how prejudices can lead even the most well-intentioned of people astray. Plot goes through the familiar beats of a Disney film, except for a pretty retarded third-act heel turn that I won’t spoil, but it would make more sense and have more story impact if the character didn’t feel so minor, and if it wasn’t so last-minute in the movie. “Frozen” was dull as shit, but at least the scene where HANS BETRAYS ANNA (spoiler warning) was pretty hilarious because of how well-timed and out of nowhere it was. The “grown-up” references (Godfather, Breaking Bad, etc.) feel pretty forced, mainly due to them just being references and not actual jokes. Overall, it’s a decent, well-made, and occasionally funny film (“I mean, I am just a dumb bunny, but we are good at multiplying”), but the overly-formulaic and predictable plot signifies that Disney’s lack of creative ambition is still there. Also, the sloth scene might have been funny if I hadn’t already seen it in the trailer. It’s definitely not one of those scenes that’s funny more than once.

Recommended for kids, furries, and those who love animal puns.

72. Hush – A deaf-mute writer is terrorized in her home by a psychopath intent on killing her. A nice premise with a refreshing twist on the tired home invasion genre, and the movie is a brisk 81 minutes. However, I feel like it should have been shorter, and it was only so long because the villain was so unbelievably stupid. At multiple points he could have entered her home and killed her pretty easily, but the plot dictates that she needs to think of ways to survive and outsmart him, so he’s just written as a crazy and evil idiot who wants to toy with his prey. I imagine most people would be fine with it, but his behavior became more annoying than scary after a while.

Making the film watchable is the solid directing and cinematography, along with writer/star Kate Siegel who makes for a very sympathetic and likable protagonist. We both wince and feel for her character when she gets hurt, as she sobs quietly but can’t audibly cry. Her performance is so convincing that I was genuinely surprised to find out that she’s not actually deaf in real life. The movie is decent and worth watching if you like horror-thrillers, and it shows than Blumhouse can still produce the occasional, not-garbage horror film.

71. War Dogs - I wasn’t a fan of the “Hangover” trilogy, even if the third entry was an admirably bold middle-finger to all of its established fans, but I saw talent in Todd Phillips’ direction which made me somewhat look forward to his next endeavor. Based on a true story, Miles Teller and Jonah Hill play two 20-something Miami dudes who get into the world of gun-running and happen upon a major but shady deal with the U.S. government. Basically, “Lord of War” for the new generation. However, where “Lord of War” was, despite its’ wry sense of humor, a pretty dramatic and searing look at the arms trade and the U.S. government’s involvement with it. “War Dogs”, meanwhile, feels more like a lightweight “Wolf of Wall Street”-esque rise-and-fall story of two friends and businessmen that, despite the constant references to the Bush administration, feels like only a passing criticism of the government. The key problem with the movie is how been-there-done-that it is. Even if you know nothing about the real-world story that inspired it, all the dramatic beats and character progressions are thoroughly predictable, and watching it I felt like I’ve seen this movie a hundred times already. It even opens with a variation of that freeze-frame “You’re probably wondering how I got in this situation” cliché. It’s not bad. It’s solid in pretty much every aspect. The directing by Phillips (I like a visual gag where a character sees approaching Iraqi insurgents in his truck’s side mirror, then the camera pans down to “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear”), the writing, the acting (with a noteworthy turn by Jonah Hill). It’s all fine. But the movie’s crippling lack of ambition means that by the end of the year, it’ll probably be completely forgotten about. I’m writing this review two days after having seen it and I’m genuinely having trouble remembering things about it. To put it in a hack-y movie critic kind of way; “War Dogs” is a gun that doesn’t malfunction, but never hits the bulls-eye either.

70. Jason Bourne – If the Bourne films popularized the “gritty espionage thriller” genre, 2016’s “Jason Bourne” feels like a generic knockoff made while the trend was hot, except it’s several years later and no one really cares. Still, I was looking forward to the film, because there are so few good action movies coming out these days and Paul Greengrass is at least a pretty strong director. I will always slightly resent Greengrass for popularizing the shaky-cam, fast-editing style of action filmmaking, but I admit he does it better than pretty much everyone, and it actually suits Bourne’s gritty, improvisational nature. There’s an early chase set during a riot in Athens and a climactic chase in Las Vegas that feel as urgent and intense as any action scenes I’ve seen in a while. Still, you wish the guy would invest in a tripod or something. It’s nice that Greengrass doesn’t discriminate, but exclusively hiring camera operators with Parkinson’s does make the end product a bit hard to follow, visually.

The plot is some hokum about the CIA trying to knock off a billionaire social media tech guru because he won’t let them use his product to spy on everyone, and somehow Jason Bourne is brought out of exile/retirement because of EVEN MORE buried secrets about his past. It’s pretty generic stuff that tries to be timely but comes across as trying too hard. Damon’s a compelling lead, and he’s given a decent villainous counterpart in Vincent Cassel, but it’s hard to be involved in the material. I was also disappointed by the lack of character development for Julia Stiles’ returning Nicky Parsons. Some insight into why she came out of hiding to give Bourne information would have been nice. The rest of the cast is unmemorable; Tommy Lee Jones in particular looks like he’s counting down the seconds until he stops shooting and can cash in his check.

You can tell that this is a tacked-on cash-grab sequel. They couldn’t even bother thinking of a proper Bourne title (The Bourne Resurgence, maybe?), and while Damon and Greengrass are definitely not half-assing it, you can tell their hearts aren’t really in this. Their workmanlike approach and their undeniable talent, however, does mean that Jason Bourne is an enjoyable thriller, and you’ll at least get a great pair of action scenes out of it. Still, what the hell were they thinking, making a Bourne film without Jeremy Renner?

69. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story - There is perhaps no bigger red flag to me for a major blockbuster movie than hearing about “extensive reshoots”. Putting aside the lessons we’ve learned from “Fantastic 4” and “Suicide Squad”, the main problem with these kinds of reshoots is that it speaks to the studio not having enough confidence in the director’s vision, and more in the opinions of test audiences. I know that reshoots are commonplace in the film industry, but when they announced that “Rogue One” would have several weeks of reshoots that weren’t even headed by director Gareth Edwards, my heart sank a bit.

Now, I don’t mean to compare this to the previously mentioned comic-book dumpster fires, but the fact that “Rogue One” is just “kinda good” makes it pretty disappointing for me. Before some of you nerds ask; no, I didn’t watch this film with the sole purpose of criticizing it and ruining the Star Wars circlejerk. I was really looking forward to it when I heard that Gareth Edwards would direct, because his recent “Godzilla” reboot was fucking awesome and easily one of the best blockbusters of recent years, and I had hoped that “Rogue One” would mark an effort in taking this unkillable franchise to bold, new directions. It’s not like doing so would even be considered risky; “Star Wars” fans would literally pay money to eat dogshit if they were told it’d be canon or if the actor who played Wedge Antilles told them to do it.

But there’s the problem. Despite some differences in approach to the main saga, “Rogue One” is as safe as they come. Sure, there’s no opening crawl and the visuals are grittier than usual, but in terms of dialogue, storytelling, style of music, etc., it’s still very much a Star Wars movie. I do like how the movie takes itself fairly seriously and is bereft of the typical cringe-worthy Disneyquips©, but it kind of lacks the passion and inspiration that made so many people fall in love with the original trilogy.

Michael Giacchino’s score does the job, but isn’t all that memorable. He happily mimics John Williams’ style, but doesn’t display the sense of flair or majesty that made Williams’ music for this series so famous. It’s a shame we’ll never get to hear original composer Alexandre Desplat’s work for this film (he couldn’t do the score due to rescheduling around the reshoots).

The cast is a major case of “talented actors let down by a weak script and thin characters”. Try doing the Plinkett thing and describe the characters’ personalities, without talking about their role in the plot or their motivations, and ask yourself if any of them sound interesting. The main character Jyn Erso is especially disappointing, since what initially seems like a personal quest to find her father turns into her just selflessly becoming a noble rebel hero. There’s kind of an arc, sure, but it’s seriously missing any real drama to make the arc meaningful. This is especially bad during the slow and plodding first two acts of the film, which are rather unengaging and even boring at times.

The only somewhat amusing characters are the droid K-2SO (Alan Tudyk), the blind kung-fu former Jedi (Donnie Yen), and the Death Star director (Ben Mendelsohn). The droid is pretty much the only source of humor in the film, and he feels welcome because he doesn’t feel over-the-top (he’s a kind of cross between C3PO and HK-47). Donnie Yen is an insanely charismatic actor, and he makes his character interesting enough that he can overcome the writing. Ben Mendelsohn makes for an entertaining and slimy villain, but he’s let down by the script and the constraints of the canon more than anyone. Mendelsohn’s naturally villainous performance is wasted due to his character’s frequent emasculation at the hands of old franchise baddies Grand Moff Tarkin and Darth Vader.

And therein lies the crux of the matter, both that of the film and of Disney; they focus less on building the future or telling new, memorable stories in lieu of milking the past for all it’s worth. This is best exemplified by Disney’s decision to reintroduce a pair of ANH characters using their creepy, uncanny-valley CGI technology and body doubles. They did this in a few Marvel movies to have actors play younger versions of themselves, but here they use it to bring a dead actor (Peter Cushing as Tarkin) back to life, and it’s quite morbid and uncomfortable when you think about it. They literally bought a dead man’s likeness from his estate to milk it for nostalgia bucks. Is that where we are as a society where we’re totally cool with something like this? Wouldn’t it be much more natural (and cheaper) to just recast the old characters? You know, with human beings and whatnot?

Don’t get me wrong. As an action-space-fantasy movie, “Rogue One” works well enough. I mentioned previously that the first two acts are meh, despite some good moments (like the Death Star’s demonstration on a desert city, and the whole opening scene). Most of the movie was characters traveling from one colorless location to the next, getting into a scuffle with the Empire, then escaping. It’s in the third act where the movie really kicks into gear. The stakes are raised, things feel more urgent, and the bland locations are swapped for a beautiful tropical beach setting with an Empire base on it. It’s basically one large action sequence, but it works. Edwards again uses his excellent sense of scale and visual prowess to make the battle feel epic and exciting. As someone who isn’t a big Star Wars fan, it’s easily the best 30-40 minutes in any of the movies for me.

However, while “Rogue One” gives an admirable effort in being its own thing, it can’t help but keep calling back to the original trilogy just to please its established fanbase. I don’t blame all of the film’s flaws on the reshoots. There’s no obvious difference between original and new footage like a crappy wig or awful, forced humor. And who knows, maybe the reshoots actually made the film better. But at the end, “Rogue One” feels like it doesn’t want to be a Star Wars movie but is forced to be one (pun intended) by its strict parents. So often the characters go on about “hope”, as if they are seeking HOPE of a NEW variety. It may be like poetry (it rhymes), but after a point it becomes less poetry and more beating you over the head with a rhyming dictionary. For future installments, let’s cross our fingers for a little less “hope” and a little more “new”.

68. Passengers – Betrays Chris Pratt’s best movie performance to date, an excellent first act, and its own interesting (and pretty disturbing) premise by watering it down with schmaltzy Hollywood romance, unnecessary action, and a cancer-inducing end-credits Imagine Dragons song. I could write an entire essay on why the movie’s specific approach to its story is deeply uncomfortable. I’m also pretty much over Jennifer Lawrence at this point.

67. Three – Intriguing and unique chamber piece, but its comical elements and over-the-top melodrama feel out of place, and the final shootout feels like style just for style’s sake, which makes it oddly boring. Watchable, but a massive step down for Johnnie To after his excellent “Drug War”.

66. Captain Fantastic – Soulful performance from Viggo Mortensen and the occasional touching and insightful moment help buoy this portrayal of family and unconventional parenting whose biggest flaw is having a script and viewpoint that’s too smug and proud of itself for its own good, which makes most of the emotional moments feel cheap and unearned. Wes Anderson could have made a great movie out of this.

65. The Edge of Seventeen – Overcomes (just barely) the unlikability of its main character, the annoying way characters always describe what they’re going through, and its own sheer predictability with good performances, the occasional funny line and a fairly honest and empathetic look at growing up. I’d respect it more if it had the balls to have an unhappy ending. Woody Harrelson gives probably my favorite portrayal of a teacher in a movie.

64. Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice – Oh, boy, here we go. For the record, this review is of the extended cut of the film.

I firmly believe that you can make or break a movie in editing. No matter how good the writing, acting, directing, and cinematography are, if a film is poorly edited, it becomes confusing at best, and a complete chore to watch at worst. Such was the case with the theatrical cut of the highly-anticipated (not by me, of course) “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice”, a film that despite being two-and-a-half hours long, felt like a rushed and confusing mess. I’m not saying that the extended cut is some sort of masterpiece, but this 3-hour version is what Zack Snyder intended the finished product to be before Warner Bros. got their stupid fucking fingers on it. Characters are given more scenes to be fleshed out, subplots are better developed, and the pacing is significantly improved, amounting to a much more coherent and downright better film. If you saw the theatrical version and are really on the fence about the film, I recommend watching the extended cut.

The movie itself is still fundamentally flawed in some aspects. It’s still a film constrained by the pressure to set up an entire cinematic universe, which makes the story itself suffer. It probably should have been solely about the personal grudge between Batman and Superman and the consequences it takes on both of them, and them eventually teaming up together when they realize they’re not so different and both want the same thing. The actual movie tries to do that, have Lex Luthor try to destroy both of them, introduce Wonder Woman, set up Wonder Woman’s origin story, set-up three other Justice League members’ origin stories, set up the Justice League movie itself, have an investigative Lois Lane subplot, hint at a future bad guy, and create a giant Frankenstein monster for the third act, among other things. The movie does keep most of these plates spinning, but some of them do fall. It’s an ambitious undertaking, but we’re still left with expensive broken china.

The writing is pretty hackneyed, too. If you can explain Lex Luthor’s motivation for hating Superman to me without citing a comic book or saying “it’s just what he does”, please do. They hint at some biblical reason for it (the Christ allegories and symbolism are even less subtle here as they were in “Man of Steel”, to give you an idea), but it came across as Lex hating him for no particular reason and trying to quote scripture to justify it. There are like three extended dream sequences in the movie, which feels like two too many. And then there’s that awful flow-breaking scene where they set-up The Flash, Cyborg, and Aquaman. I’m reminded of an anecdote where during the making of “Man of Steel”, Zack Snyder wanted to include an after-credits scene but producer Christopher Nolan opposed, telling him “A real movie wouldn’t do that.” This story is probably bullshit, but I think it’s funny that Snyder made an after-credits scene and just crowbarred it into the middle of the movie.

“Batman v. Superman” attempts (and actually succeeds for a while) to really create a sense of consequence in a comic book movie, with the whole world, particularly Batman, being concerned about Superman’s presence on Earth after the destruction caused in “Man of Steel”. But it’s all kind of thrown out the window when that conflict is immediately dropped after the “MARTHA” scene so they could team up to fight the aforementioned Frankenstein monster. The “MARTHA” scene has become kind of infamous, but I was actually fine with it (even if it could have been better written) until Batman says “Don’t worry. Martha’s not dying tonight”, which got a good howl out of me. It was at the very least an interesting movie until it became the typical third-act destruction fest that has characterized so many superhero flicks, with even a few tonally jarring quips thrown in for good measure. The actual fight between Batman and Superman only lasts for like 5 minutes, despite so much buildup. While fun, it feels really schlocky, especially when Batman rips a sink out of a bathroom wall and starts beating Superman over the head with it. Why they started fighting in the first place instead of talking it out like Superman originally intended is beyond me, as well. Zack Snyder’s penchant for outstanding visuals is never in question (he does handheld camerawork better than pretty much anyone) but his grasp on storytelling has always been a bit iffy, even if this is arguably his best work.

If you’re a comic book fan and weren’t a fan of the characterization in this film, the extended cut won’t change your mind on that. Superman is still kind of a dick, Lex Luthor is still a Jolly Rancher-sucking autist, and Batman still kills people. It (mostly) makes sense in the context in the film, and I personally didn’t care too much, but I know some comic book fans who won’t forgive it. Last but not least, I want to mention what is probably the most annoying product placement I’ve seen in a movie this year. It’s not as gratuitous as a TMNT or Transformers flick, but at least those films didn’t take themselves seriously. There is nothing that can ruin a good, serious scene like a really out-of-place product placement. I was enjoying the scene with Clark Kent and Lois Lane in the bathtub until the camera turned to the bottle of Olay and stayed there for like a solid 2 seconds. The scene I was most looking forward to in the movie (the “Man of Steel” destruction of Metropolis as seen through Bruce Wayne’s eyes, which was really well done) was really hurt by the fact that right before the movie started they showed an ad for the Jeep used in the scene, using footage from the movie. There’s also a scene where Lex Luthor tries to force-feed Holly Hunter a Jolly Rancher. I understand that the movie’s titanic budget has to come from somewhere, but it’s shit like this that really pulls me out of the movie.

The cast is strong, particularly Jeremy Irons’ Alfred and Ben Affleck, who exceeds all expectations as Batman, even if he looks a bit silly in the suit. If nothing else, I’m really looking forward to his solo Batfleck film. Gal Gadot is nothing special, but at least she isn’t terrible. Henry Cavill is solid and likable even when the script lets him down, as is Amy Adams (not to politicize things, but I feel like this movie is getting no credit whatsoever for actually having a female love-interest who is like ten years older than her male counterpart, as opposed to the typical older-male-younger-female one). I like how they try to make Laurence Fishburne’s newspaper editor like a reverse J. Jonah Jameson from Spider-Man, constantly telling Clark Kent to report on some local sports team and admonishing him for writing about a vigilante dressed up as a bat beating the shit out of criminals and branding them.

I could go on, but at least BvS feels like an actual movie, instead of the really long trailer that was “Man of Steel”. Its (many) flaws aside, Zack Snyder is to be commended for using such a massive budget to at least try and do something different and ambitious than typical superhero films, and the fact that he succeeds as much as he does despite so many expectations and so much pressure is to be lauded. His cast is good, his action scenes are brutal and weighty (I loved that “Arkham” style warehouse fight between Batman and a group of armed thugs), his heart is in the right place, and he really, honestly dares to be different. If he had a better script and a not-terrible studio to back him up, “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice” would be appreciated for what it is, and not the kind of movie that inspires actual news articles about RottenTomatoes.

63. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk – Uneven but occasionally powerful and refreshingly biting look at America’s oft-hypocritical worship of its soldiers and what battle can really do to their psyche, with lead actor and newcomer Joe Alwyn deftly carrying the movie on his shoulders. Let down by a weak script and most of the supporting characters being one-dimensional caricatures, however intentional it may be. The weirdest cast ever assembled for a drama (Garrett Hedlund, Chris Tucker, Steve Martin, Kristen Stewart, and Vin Diesel) works surprisingly well, except for the sadly out-of-place Martin. Didn’t get to see it in the original 4K, 120fps format, but at least I don’t get a headache out of it.

62. Hidden Figures – Typical inspirational historical drama. Sugary and as clichéd as it gets, but solid enough that it works. Elevated by strong performances from the three leading women, made amusing by how every other line spoken by any of them is an Obama-esque crowd-pleasing “Mmhmm” moment, and almost ruined by the presence of Bazinga as a racist, sexist strawman who is just there to be continually outsmarted and embarrassed by the smart, black lady. Probably going to become a staple in high school math/physics classes with lazy teachers. Thumbs up for the Oscar-bait title.

61. 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi – I let out a good chortle when I heard that there would be a movie about the 2012 Benghazi attack starring Jim from “The Office” and directed by none other than Michael Bay, a man whose approach to maturity and good taste generally amounts to a passing laugh and cocaine-sneeze. It was to my pleasant surprise (and admitted slight disappointment) that “13 Hours” turned out to be not only a solid military thriller but also Bay’s most restrained and mature movie. Don’t get me wrong; there’s still plenty of military hardware porn, explosions, and tastefully lit shots of a shirtless John Krasinski (hnnng). However, it also doesn’t include the obnoxious humor and out-of-place product placement that characterize most of his films (although there is a really unnecessary scene in a McDonald’s drive-through), and it actually takes itself fairly seriously, which is surprising coming from the guy who directed a film about two Miami cops who single-handedly invade Cuba.

It presents an account of what happened that night at the U.S. embassy and nearby CIA station as seen through the perspective of the security contractors stationed there, and it avoids politicizing the matter. There’s an annoying CIA chief strawman who refuses to let the contractors go in early to rescue the ambassador, but that’s pretty much the extent of it. The rest is a tense military action film, along with the expected jingoistic hero worship that these types of films have to include by law or something, though thankfully it’s not as bad here. Bay spends a decent amount of time setting up the location, the characters and the situation, before tits go inevitably up. The characters are fairly thin, their non-action scenes amounting to the usual dick-swinging soldier banter and some phone calls to their wholesome, attractive families back home, but the actors are good and convincing enough to make you care about them.

The action scenes are the reasons to see this, characterized by strong sound design and the aforementioned hardware porn that I admittedly enjoy, as well as some great shots, like the slo-motion one of a soldier surrounded by sparks. I also liked the atmosphere of the film, as the contractors slowly move through the ghostly streets of Benghazi, one of them remarking “It’s like we’re in a horror movie”, as some residents nearby are casually watching a soccer match while ignoring the gunfights outside their homes, as if it’s just another weekday evening.

The writing is pretty weak. It gets the needed information across, but the characterization is thin, the dialogue ranges from corny to boring, and there really isn’t enough plot to make this movie as long as it is.

Nontheless, it’s a solid action-thriller. I’ve defended Michael Bay for a long time now (mainly because he made “The Rock”, and I don’t see any other fucking director that made “The Rock”), but between this and 2013’s “Pain & Gain” he shows how much better he can be with smaller budgets and when not constrained by a plot involving giant robots punching each other and making racial wisecracks.

60. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping – Imagine “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story”, but not as good, and you get a good idea of what “Popstar” is like. The humor was pretty hit-or-miss and definitely favored quantity over quality when it came to the jokes, as can be expected from a movie made by SNL alumni, but it kept me entertained and made me laugh enough to warrant a recommendation. Funniest bits were the TMZ parodies, Justin Timberlake, and the “Equal Rights” music video.

59. Midnight Special – I like Jeff Nichols as a filmmaker. It’s partly because Michael Shannon is in all of his films, and I’ll watch anything that man does at this point, but Nichols has shown himself to be a nuanced and compelling storyteller with an excellent command of both atmosphere and tone. It’s this skilled storytelling and another strong performance from Shannon that make Midnight Special worth watching, even if it’s all in service of a story that becomes pretty dumb by the time we find out what’s going on.

The basic plot is that of a father who runs away from a religious compound with his son and is soon hunted by a number of groups because of some mysterious power that his son possesses. The opening scene where they and a helping friend of the father hurriedly leave a motel room and drive away into the night is excellent and expertly sets up a low-key but involving sci-fi thriller tone. Unfortunately, the more the movie goes on, the more we find out what the son’s powers are and what his “purpose” is, and without spoiling anything, it lost me pretty quickly after the late-second act revelation. The strong cast led by Shannon and Nichols’ direction kept the movie compelling enough to get me to the finish line, but this is definitely a case of a screenplay being too ambitious for its own good.

58. Green Room – Punk rockers vs. neo-Nazis is a premise more fitting of a sillier movie, in my opinion. Writer/director Jeremy Saulnier (who made 2014’s underrated gem “Blue Ruin”) probably knew this, and subverts it by making “Green Room” as grim and unpleasant as he possibly could. Going off of a theme from “Blue Ruin”, the deaths in this movie are often bloody, realistically brutal, and purposely sudden and anticlimactic, simultaneously being a violent movie but also anti-violence. Saulnier’s technical aptitude and the talents of the cast are never in question, and the movie itself is quite gripping and well-paced. I don’t think “Green Room” is as good or thematically rich as “Blue Ruin”, and the ending is a bit of a letdown, but it’s still a well-made and clever genre flick, and if you enjoy feeling like shit and averting your eyes from the screen then it’s the movie for you.

57. Eye in the Sky – A government joint-operation to kill some high-ranking terrorists in Kenya via a drone strike is halted when a little local girl enters the kill-radius. The story is told from the perspective of a ground recon team trying to get her out, the drone pilots, and the military brass and government officials who argue about whether the strike is justified and should be carried out. It has a good setup and a pretty powerful climax, but drags quite a bit in the middle portion where those in charge of the operation keep referring up to their superiors to figure out if they can/should/will fire the missile. The cast, in particular the late, great Alan Rickman as a weary general, are good enough to get you through the duller bits of the movie, and it’s really nice to see Barkhad Abdi in a movie again. While it could have trimmed some of its excess fat, “Eye in the Sky” is a tense, compelling thriller, and a much more mature and responsible examination of the consequences of drone warfare than “London Has Fallen”, albeit much less entertaining.

56. Sully – You’ve got to give Clint Eastwood credit. For a guy in his mid 80’s, he sure is prolific these days, regularly cranking out solid movies every year or two. In retelling the events of the “Miracle on the Hudson” passenger plane water landing from a years beack “Sully” continues that tradition by being good. Not great, but good. Tom Hanks makes for a fine lead, Aaron Eckhart is decent as Hanks’ co-pilot and friend (albeit constantly overshadowed by his own glorious mustache), just about everything else is meh. The highlight of the movie is the water landing itself, shown 3 times at different points from the perspectives of an air traffic controller, the passengers, and finally the cockpit. These scenes are intense and pretty harrowing, dodgy CGI aside. The rest of the movie is either the lead-up to the flight, or the aftermath where Captain Sully deals with the mental trauma from the incident and contends with a federal investigative committee that easily wins the award for “Most Obvious Strawmen of the Year”. Whatever. The film is well-made and compelling enough. As I said before, it’s good. It’s the definition of a 7/10 movie. If you’re old, like the audience during my theater showing was, you’ll probably love it. Everyone else will probably just like it. If you’re expecting something along the lines of Eastwood’s “Unforgiven” or “Letters from Iwo Jima”, you’ll be disappointed, but if you just want a solid, likable movie, this won’t Sully your expectations…I’m sorry for that one.

55. Christine – An amazing, simultaneously magnetic but also hard-to-watch performance by Rebecca Hall as 1970’s reporter Christine Chubbuck, and a very raw portrayal of depression, but ultimately feels pointless as it says nothing about Chubbuck or her mental state, as if the film is keeping her at a distance when it should be holding us down face-first into what she was truly feeling, making the ordeal feel kind of exploitative, when you think about it. If you know her story, the scene you spend the whole movie anticipating is done excellently, however.

54. Certain Women – MINIMALISM. It’s either your type of thing or it isn’t. “Certain Women” is three loosely-connected stories about women who live in Montana, and it’s as grounded and un-flashy as a film can get without being a home movie. It’s one of those films that’s about normal people and their everyday problems, and makes it all seem profound. To me, it worked well for the most part. I was engaged by the nicely composed cinematography and the good performances. The three stories vary in quality. Laura Dern plays a small-town lawyer who gets caught up in a hostage situation, and this is the most straightforward of the three, but also quite engaging. Michelle Williams plays a mother who wants to build her dream home in the woods but faces ambivalence from everyone in her life, and hers is the weakest story, if only because it feels so short and anticlimactic (even by this movie’s standards). 

The third story is surprisingly the best, with a ranch hand played by newcomer Lily Gladstone who forms a bond with a young law school graduate played by Kristen Stewart, and it’s an affecting and nuanced look at loneliness. Kelly Reichardt’s direction is modest and very low-key, but it’s empathetic and creates a good sense of atmosphere. This movie is also slower than watching paint dry at half-speed, lacks any overt drama and is very light on plot, so it’s one of those movies you’ll either completely love or won’t care for at all. I liked it, because I’m an edgy contrarian, and because I like a movie that gives its characters breathing room and trusts the audience to be smart enough to get their own thematic value out of it, so it’s worth your while if you’re not feeling too sleepy. Plus, there’s an adorable corgi in it, so automatic recommendation from me.

53. Manchester by the Sea – Reading the reviews and seeing all the award nominations, you’d think this mostly plotless exploration of grief is the desperately-needed salvation of cinema. When the credits rolled, however, all that hype ended up giving me was a resounding “Wait, that’s it?”.

The film is about a Boston janitor with a tragic past whose brother dies, and he goes back to his coastal New England hometown to handle his brother’s affairs and break the news to his son. As the janitor, Casey Affleck delivers one of the best portrayals of grief I’ve ever seen. Even before you know his story, his eyes and demeanor subtly hide an ocean of pain and heartbreak, and he pulls it off so naturally you often forget you’re watching an actor. Equally as good (and possibly better) is Michelle Williams, who plays his ex-wife. The filmmaking crime of the century is only putting her in the movie for like 5-10 minutes, where focusing more on her and Affleck’s relationship would have made the movie infinitely better, in my opinion. The guy who plays Affleck’s nephew is alright, given that his and Affleck’s relationship is the core of the movie, but nothing to write home about other than one really good breakdown scene. Everyone else ranges from “passable” to “clearly acting for the first time” to “distracting cameo from Matthew Broderick”.

I don’t wish to imply that the movie fails in any major way. I wasn’t a fan of how often the movie tried to be funny (“funny” in that New England way where characters swear a lot), and there is a glaring overuse of music, but it wasn’t a deal-breaker. I suppose that outside of a small handful of powerful scenes and moments, “Manchester by the Sea” felt like it was missing that emotional gut-punch it aimed for. It peaks halfway through in a flashback where we see what made Affleck’s character the way he is, and the movie only comes close to matching it during the last scene between Affleck and Williams. Don’t get me wrong; I understand the intention of making the film understated, so as to show a realistic depiction of grief, where people kind of just continue going about life and trying to not think about it. However, it goes a bit too far in this direction, to the point where I didn’t care for the mundanity of their lives and wanted some crying and goddamn emotion. This may be an over-simplification of how I feel, but basically, the movie is 10/10 when Affleck and Williams are onscreen together, an 8/10 when it’s just Affleck, and a 5/10 or a 6/10 when it’s any other combination of actors.

52. A Bigger Splash – Seems like it’s going to be a mature meditation on romance and desire until Ralph Fiennes shows up 5 minutes in, steals the entire fucking movie away from both the director and the rest of the cast, rubs his dick on the print, then sets it on fire while giggling to himself and dancing around naked. One of the best performances in a career filled with great performances. Movie goes downhill significantly in the last 30 or so minutes.

51. The Love Witch – Clever satire of gender dynamics as seen through the eyes of a love-addicted femme fatale witch. PERFECTLY nails the old-school Technicolor horror/sexploitation vibe. The art design, camerawork, hair/makeup, and even the way the actors behave is spot-on. Bravo to director Anna Biller and all involved as far as the technical aspects go. Story is at first detrimentally slow and the movie is far too long, but it picks up in the second half. Feels a bit too written, as if the characters occasionally stop being themselves and become mouthpieces for the writer/director.

50. Hardcore Henry – Let it not be said that there is no innovative filmmaking these days. Russian musician and music video director Ilya Naishuller was given a few million dollars to make a balls-to-the-wall action film filmed entirely from the first-person perspective of the main character. The most impressive thing about the stupidly-titled “Hardcore Henry” is how much mileage it manages to get out of its first-person gimmick, and how surprisingly well-made it is. Actual stunts are performed, effects are mostly practical (aside from a few bits of awful CGI), and you always feel like you’re in the body of the main character. The action scenes are fun and inventive, there’s a good deal of humor (I liked the bit with the overlapping subtitles), and Sharlto Copley gives a great performance as several incarnations of the same man with different personalities and looks. The plot is completely shit, and gets a bit too bogged down with exposition at times, but it’s never too intrusive. I suppose the biggest concern there is with this movie is if you can handle the filming technique, because the constant movement of the camera, especially during the action scenes, can give you motion sickness. I got a headache and a bit of nausea while watching it, but it could have been from the McDonald’s I had just before seeing it, so I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt. I think that it works much better on a small screen instead of a movie theater either way, and even while on the verge of throwing up, I had a good deal of fun with “Hardcore Henry”. If you’ve ever used a VR headset while on meth, it should give you a good idea of the experience.

49. Hail, Caesar! – The Coen Brothers are my favorite filmmakers. So strong is their output that even their “bad” movies are good movies by any other standard. I don’t wish to imply that “Hail, Caesar!” is one of their “bad” ones, but it’s definitely on the lower end of their spectrum. The promotional material led me to believe that it would be a comic thriller about a 1950’s Hollywood fixer (a “problem solver” for studios) who teams up with a number of colorful showbiz people to rescue a kidnapped leading man. While the basic plot is there, the movie feels more like a leisurely series of vignettes about the colorful characters, loosely-connected by the fixer asking them for their help. It’s all amusing, colorful, and beautifully shot by eternal Oscars bridesmaid Roger Deakins, but it feels like it’s missing any sort of narrative thrust or stakes. The Coens don’t seem to be going for that sort of film, and it feels intentionally meandering and light, so the film is better if you go in expecting it. The writing is entertaining, but while the film is certainly hilarious in parts and never boring, some comedic bits feel stretched out for far too long (such as the scene with the religious leaders), which is unusual for the Coens.

The whole endeavor is less about plot and more about being a fun tribute-by-way-of-pisstake to Old Hollywood. It reminds me a bit of their earlier work “Barton Fink”, albeit broader, sillier, less existential, and much less cynical. We see old-fashioned editing rooms, grand movie sets, a wonderful musical number, Communism, etc. The Coen Brothers made a film that feels nostalgic towards a simpler era of filmmaking, while still acknowledging that even back then they made crap films. The biggest selling point in the movie is its’ all-star cast. I can’t remember the last time a movie had this many big-name actors attached to it. Sadly, due to the light nature of the story, a lot of them feel like glorified cameos, even if there isn’t a weak link among them. George Clooney is in top-form in the role of the kidnapped actor, the type of buffoon the Coens always seem to make him play. Channing Tatum is great as a tap-dancing musical star. Completely stealing the show is up-and-comer Aldren Ehrenreich, who plays a dopey but sweet cowboy actor, and who is so naturally funny, likable and charismatic here that I don’t have a single doubt about him becoming huge in the near future.

It just goes to show that even a lesser Coen Bros. film is still vastly better than the best work by most directors. While slow and kind of pointless overall, “Hail, Caesar!” is still a funny, gorgeous, and charming homage to the Hollywood Golden Age, one that rewards attention and repeated viewings, and welcomes them as well.

48. Finding Dory – Not on par with “WALL-E” or “Up”, but entertaining and nicely emotional. Feels like a welcome return to form for Pixar after so many years of disappointments. Bonus points for being the good kind of sequel, one that not only works on its own but actually adds new dimension to the original. Kind of disappointing, because before seeing the movie I was all ready to say “Finding Dory? More like FOUND IT BORING”. Nice message about family and taking care of a family member with special needs. Looking forward to “Finding Marlin”, where we see Marlin as an alcoholic going through a midlife crisis as he tries to singlehandedly raise a crippled son and his mentally handicapped friend.

47. Deadpool – One of my biggest pet peeves in movies is characters breaking the fourth-wall. I don’t mind a film being cheeky, but a movie occasionally pausing itself to acknowledge that it’s a movie annoys me to no end. I say this because “Deadpool” actually does fourth-wall breaking right, making it a key part of the humor and tone and story rather than an occasional “look at how clever and ironic we are” moment.

One would think because of this that “Deadpool” is just an endless series of self-referential jokes. It mostly is, but thankfully there’s an actual story, a bicycle for all the colorful tassels to hang on. Don’t get me wrong; the story is generic as hell. It’s still your typical superhero origin story, albeit one helped greatly by the nonlinear structure, alluding to Deadpool as an unreliable narrator. Also helping is a surprisingly engaging romance aspect, thanks to Ryan Reynolds’ and Morena Baccarin’s great chemistry and that the romance is a key part of the main character’s motivations (and that the girl feels like an actual character, not just a crowbarred-in love interest like almost every other comic book movie). One of the best scenes in the film is a montage of them “celebrating” various holidays.

Reynolds is perfectly cast as Wade Wilson, a role that his whole career since “Van Wilder” has been building towards. He effortlessly captures the character’s smarminess and gallows humor, but also makes him just likable enough to root for. Baccarin shows enough personality and comic timing that I certainly won’t mind seeing her having a bigger role in the sequel. The action sequences are the highlights. Tim Miller (in his directing debut) shows a clear aptitude for this, making the fight scenes bloody, funny, and visually creative, doing more with $60 million than most directors can do with $200 million.

Your enjoyment of “Deadpool” will come from whether you like its sense of humor. Given the sheer amount of jokes the film flings at the wall, a number of them are going to fall flat. However, to me a lot of them did land, and the movie is quite funny despite being a bit too in love with itself, and any comedy film that doesn’t give away its best jokes in the trailer (especially with a marketing campaign like this film had) is worthy of a recommendation in my eyes.

46. Blood Father – This is the best Liam Neeson movie that Liam Neeson never made. The action is tense and hard-hitting, the cast is good, and the movie is a very lean and efficient 88 minutes. However, there’s some distractingly bad editing at times, the plot is typical Liam Neeson fare (daughter is in trouble with criminals and seeks out her estranged ex-con dad to help out) and the dialogue is pretty wonky and overly reliant on swearing. Also, the girl is fairly annoying, but I suppose it suits her character so I won’t judge her too much for it. What makes the movie work is Mel Gibson’s performance. Looking increasingly like a shredded, captivity-era Saddam Hussein, Gibson is a volcano almost constantly on the verge of eruption. He plays a pissed-off man better than anyone, but he also showcases a good deal of humor and heart, able to convey more with his demeanor than most actors can with an entire monologue. Plus, watching him bite a guy’s ear off before head-butting him repeatedly is great fun. While Gibson is definitely better than the film’s B-movie material, he sells the hell out of it, elevating everything around him and making up for a lot of the movie’s flaws (you get the feeling it’d be much better if he directed it, as well). “Blood Father” is not quite the Mel Gibson renaissance-marking comeback I keep hoping for, but it’s good enough to recommend. Here’s hoping we don’t have to wait another few years to be reminded how great of an actor he is. Can’t quell the Mel.

45. The Brothers Grimsby (AKA Grimsby) - It’s been a while since we’ve gotten a comedy from Sacha Baron Cohen. His stuff other than “Borat” has gotten a mixed reception, but I’ve always felt that that as a comic he has excellent timing and creativity, and even when not doing his famous “interacting with real people while in character” routine, the guy knows how to put together a joke. In a comedy world filled increasingly with endless cameos and cringe-worthy improv humor, it’s relieving to see a comedian that can still write a solid gag and perform it well.

Cohen plays Nobby, a trashy but kind-hearted English football hooligan who lives in Grimsby, a town so squalid that on a sign it says that its sister city is Chernobyl. He’s spent decades searching for his long-lost younger brother Sebastian (played by Mark Strong), and upon finally finding him he discovers that Sebastian is a highly-trained secret agent who is involved in stopping an elaborate terror attack. Naturally, shenanigans ensue which results in the two brothers teaming together to save the world. The plot is basically “What if James Bond had a fuckup brother?”

Some of the humor is as gross-out as it can get, getting plenty of use out of genitals and bodily fluids (there’s one sequence involving elephants that I don’t think I’ll ever forget). Quite a bit of the humor is based around English class differences, which may go over the head of American audiences, but I quite enjoyed. And some is just tastelessness and over-the-top comedic violence. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but I found myself surprised at how much did. There’s a good deal of set-ups and payoffs to the jokes, which I found refreshing, like someone actually spent time to craft the comedy in this film. I’ll say that I laughed pretty often, and I was never less than amused. Strong and Cohen have excellent chemistry together, and the film is at its best when it focuses on the two and their exchanges, with Strong proving to be an excellent straight-man to Cohen’s ridiculousness. It even has a nice little subplot about the two brothers bonding and coming to terms with why they were initially separated that even pays off during the climax.

The movie is a little over 80-minutes and moves at such a fast pace that even if a certain gag doesn’t work, it quickly moves past it. The trade-off to this is that when a gag does work, it’s not given much time to play out. I full-heartedly believe that brevity is the soul of wit, and it’s not a huge issue, but I do wish some of the jokes had a bit of breathing space. Probably the movie’s biggest sin is completely wasting its supporting cast. Penelope Cruz, Isla Fisher, Rebel Wilson, and Ian McShane all feel like bit players who are there just for plot purposes. Maybe that was intentional, to play the film like a straight-faced James Bond film with Cohen there to single-handedly derail it, but why cast talented, well-known actors in such useless bit parts?

I still recommend the film for being genuinely, unapologetically funny, and while a lot of its jokes are in bad taste, they never feel mean-spirited or overly edgy. They come from Cohen’s desire to shock you into laughing, but it feels self-aware and innocent enough that you’re more amused and bewildered rather than offended. Still, if gags about AIDS, incest, bestiality, casual gun violence, lower-class scum, and things being shoved into asses don’t sit well with you, then “The Brothers Grimsby” is not the bland, PG-13, all-inclusive safe-space you want, you precious snowflake.

44. Operation Avalanche – Starts off slowly and ploddingly but before long, it overcomes its’ potentially-gimmicky premise and occasionally unconvincing façade to become a surprisingly engaging and creative foray into “historical” found-footage bolstered by writer/director/star Matt Johnson’s deft storytelling and clear passion for filmmaking, with an unexpectedly excellent car chase to boot.

43. Loving – Jeff Nichols’ “Loving” is an account of Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple who were arrested and then exiled for being married in 1950’s Virginia, and whose case to return home eventually went all the way to the Supreme Court. Given the material and the convenient title, you’d think this was blatant Oscar-bait all the way through, but for the most part it’s not. Jeff Nichols’ empathetic direction and the strong, restrained performances by Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga as the two leads make this film feel human instead of exploitative. Nichols makes an interesting choice to keep the movie very personal and focused on the couple, with the broader Civil Rights Movement only briefly mentioned. I actually liked this approach as it makes you feel the pain and struggle and love of the characters first, and then by extension see how damaging prejudices (both institutional and personal) can be to people.

The film doesn’t completely escape Oscar-bait trappings, however. It still has the comedy-actor-playing-a-dramatic-role in the form of Nick Kroll as the ACLU lawyer assigned to the Lovings. He’s not bad or anything, but he feels a bit distracting and the role doesn’t amount to much. The music is fine, but it still has those corny inspirational cues at moments of triumph and perseverance, places where I think silence would have been much more effective. My biggest complaint is that it’s a Jeff Nichols movie and Michael Shannon is only in it for one scene. It's an important and good one, but you really wish he’d be in the movie more or maybe that’s just me because I LOVE MICHAEL SHANNON, HOLY SHIT. I've come to the conclusion that the quality of a Jeff Nichols film is often in direct proportion to how much Michael Shannon is in it (seriously, go see "Take Shelter" if you haven't already).

The best part of “Loving” is the two leads, who share a quiet but powerful chemistry, both of them reserved people whose love for each other you can feel in the littlest gestures and who don’t need any obvious histrionics or even words to show their feelings to the audience. It’s the solid core that makes the movie good, elegantly guided by Jeff Nichols’ confident and mature direction, even if the rest of it isn’t all that remarkable. Not quite a “Loving” for me, but eaily a “Liking”.

42. Deepwater Horizon - I’ve liked Peter Berg as a director ever since his underrated action-comedy “The Rundown”, starring The Rock back when he was still billed as “The Rock”. He shows an aptitude for action, pacing, and getting good performances out of his actors, but lately, he’s had a really bad case of hero worship. This, “Patriot’s Day” and “Lone Survivor” all have a frankly fetishistic view of real-life bravery, all ending in a text commending the bravery of those involved and including the names of victims, etc. This always felt like a cheap trick to me, one meant to elicit tears and nods of approval from middle-aged audience members who don’t go to the movies that often, rather than properly characterize his heroes. He gets around this somewhat by casting good actors who are likable enough that we care for them in spite of the weak writing and schlocky sense of patriotism. It all just feels weirdly exploitative of the real-life tragedies that the films depict.

As for the movie itself, it’s quite good. It starts with the prerequisite buildup on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, showing negligence on the part of some of the management and the BP executives (read: strawmen), while showing the intelligence on display by the regular, blue-collar engineers and oil rig workers. I don’t deny that things were actually like this (truthfully, I don’t care enough to look it up), but it does feel pretty clichéd in movie form. Then the disaster hits, and there’s a solid 40-or-so minutes of the rig blowing up while the crew scramble to try to contain the situation and evacuate. This part is great. Berg’s technical skill is on full display, helping you follow the characters and what’s going on despite a lot of them speaking in mostly technical terms and the setting feeling like being trapped in a maze that’s on fire. It’s fantastically gripping, edge-of-your-seat stuff, helped by the theater-shaking sound design and convincing visual effects.  The film ends with some tearful family reunions and heart-wrenching breakdowns when the survivors get back home. I’ll say that if I walked out of the film RIGHT after the screen faded to black, I would have a higher opinion about it.

If you like or at least don’t mind the hero-worship stuff, I’ll say that Deepwater Horizon is one of the year’s best-crafted thrillers, a disaster movie where the disaster actually feels scary and real as opposed to the dumb fun of something like “San Andreas”. I’m not against paying respects to the dead or to the bravery involved, but I think it should be done within the context of the film and the script, not forcing the audience to stay an extra five-minutes as some sort of memorial service that we paid money to attend.

41. Rams – This film is about a pair of Icelandic brothers who own neighboring sheep farms. They haven’t spoken to each other for 40 years due to implied but never explicitly-stated petty squabbles and stubborn jealousy, but are forced to work together to save their sheep when their flocks suffer from an outbreak of scrapie, a fatal degenerative disease that affects sheep and goats. This film is very affecting, low-key filmmaking, deftly handling heartbreaking drama, touching bonding, and even some surprisingly funny (albeit-bleak) comedy such as a scene where one character transports another to a hospital. It makes great use of the “show, don’t tell” filmmaking rule. Many scenes have little to no dialogue, but all serve a purpose in terms of plot or characterization or insight. The plot of sheep farmers trying to protect their flock may seem like a hard-to-relate-to storyline, but the film has universal themes of family and loss, and its observant and sympathetic storytelling makes the film accessible to anyone, even if they aren’t familiar with sheep mating procedures.

40. Kubo and the Two Strings - Laika has always been an overlooked animation studio, most known for making the wonderfully creepy “Coraline”, but finding little success in terms of box office even while their films are all quite good. Take “Kubo and the Two Strings”, a flawed but highly original and absolutely stunningly animated film that only managed to make a little over its production budget back, while “Zootopia” made over a billion dollars. Such is life.

The film itself is about a one-eyed boy named Kubo who is hunted by a vengeful demon and must team up with a magical monkey statue and a beetle-man to find some mystical MacGuffins that can help defeat it. It starts out very well, showing the boy’s daily routine of using his magic guitar and origami to tell stories to the local villagers. After shit goes inevitably down, it’s still quite compelling for a while, bringing a melancholy flavor to the boy’s journey and his interaction with his two companions. The problem is that the actual plot is pretty uninteresting, especially after the predictable late second-act plot twist, and while I can appreciate that the conflict resolution in the third act doesn’t just end by one character beating up another, the actual manner in which it’s resolved is pretty dumb.

The reason to see “Kubo and the Two Strings” is its gorgeous stop-motion animation. I had to smack my mouth a few times to remind myself that I wasn’t looking at high-quality CGI. It’s reassuring to learn that Laika is owned by the billionaire former CEO of Nike, so the studio isn’t exactly hurting for cash and can continue to focus on making their original and creative and beautiful movies without needing to dumb them down for most audiences, but it’s still a little depressing when good, accessible films fail to find their audience. While flawed (and nowhere near as good as “Coraline”), “Kubo and the Two Strings” is worth checking out if you love stop-motion animation as much as I do and you’re just waiting for the next Aardman film to come out.

39. April and the Extraordinary World - In an industry almost completely dominated by 3D CGI-animated films, it’s somewhat refreshing to come across a traditionally-animated 2D film. “April and the Extraordinary World” is a French film set in an alternate-history 1940’s where the world’s foremost scientists of the past several decades have gone missing, causing crucial technological innovation to not happen and for the world to continue relying on coal and eventually wood-burning steam power. In a world on the brink of war for resources, April is a young French woman whose parents are two of the missing scientists, and we follow her and her talking cat Darwin as they attempt to solve the mystery behind the disappearances.

I want to start off by mentioning the art style. The characters are the simple but expressive beady-eyed 2D people you’d expect from European animation, but the design of the bleak steampunk world and the technology is amazing. However, and this is what I really like about the film, while it shows how cool-looking steampunk technology can be, it also criticizes it for being completely retarded and impractical and damaging to both the environment and to people, cosplayers be damned (Europe is completely treeless and characters have to wear gas masks if they’re outdoors for too long). The characters (especially the talking cat) are spunky, entertaining, and even have their fair share of depth. The film carries a nice message about using science and optimism instead of violence and negativity to solve the world’s problems. This feels more like the film that “Tomorrowland” should have been, before it got Lindelof’d.

However, it does have kind of the same problem that “Tomorrowland” did, in that the third act gets pretty stupid. It’s certainly not as bad or as nonsensical as it was in that film, and while the plot twist and eventual revelation are actually built towards instead of just dumped on us, it does get rather silly and I sort of lost interest. Without spoiling too much, it does end up relying on that tiresome “in order to save humanity, we have to destroy it” sci-fi cliché that was dumb even back when “The Terminator” did it.

Still, on the whole, I was surprised by how much I liked “April and the Extraordinary World”. While it certainly loses some steam near the end (pun originally unintended), it’s still engaging and surprisingly entertaining enough for the duration of its running time to warrant a recommendation.

Note: If you can, see the French-dubbed version. The English voice actors are good, but the movie and lip-sync feel off by not being in their original language. For the record, this is the only time I’ll ever say that something (other than bread) is improved by being French.

38. Mascots – To me, a mark of a good comedy is if it makes me laugh a lot. By that criteria, Christopher Guest’s latest mockumentary about a professional mascot competition and its participants is a good comedy. There’s not much to say about this film if you’re familiar with Guest’s other improv-heavy comedy films, and structurally it’s very similar to “Best in Show”. It’s not as good as that gem, partly because it feels like a more manufactured scenario, a parody of a part of culture and a competition that doesn’t feel real in the first place (as opposed to the biting satire of the very real world of professional dog-shows), and partly because Fred Willard is only in this for like 5-10 minutes instead of 40-45. Guest regulars Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara’s absences are also felt.

Still, what I like about Guest’s style of comedy that I despise about the Judd Apatow/SNL style of improv is the timing. He knows how to edit his jokes and his characters to keep them funny, and he knows when to let a joke go, as opposed to letting it linger and rot. The fact that he doesn’t write screenplays or hold any rehearsals for himself and his cast pretty much means that he films them performing improv and leaves in whatever is funny. Despite the aforementioned absences, the cast here is still great (with standout performances by Parker Posey, Susan Yeagley, and the guy who fucks from “Silicon Valley”), the movie has plenty of laughs and a surprising amount of poignancy and sweetness, and some of the actual mascot routines in the latter half of the movie are both hilarious and even breathtaking, particularly one involving an expressionist modern-dance about feminism and art in an armadillo costume.

37. The Accountant - One of the most entertainingly uneven films I’ve seen in a long time, “The Accountant” tries to be a character study, a corporate thriller, an operator-style action film, a family drama, a quirky comedy, a PSA about autism, and it even flirts with being an odd-couple romance. It never really comes together in the traditional sense, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a blast watching it try.

The plot is about an autistic accountant who in his secret-life uncooks finances for some of the world’s most dangerous people, and how a seemingly simple assignment in auditing a robotics firm becomes dangerous and blah-blah-blah. This movie has far too much plot and little of it is worth caring about. Where it works surprisingly well is in the character study of the main character, Christian Wolff (who sounds like a name belonging to a character in a cheap erotic novel you can find in airport shops). You see his upbringing, the circumstances that led him to his current career, and his routines in trying to deal with life with high-functioning autism. I (cheekily) said from the start that Ben Affleck is perfect casting for an ass-kicking autist but he’s actually, genuinely, unironically good in a committed and fleshed-out performance that wouldn’t feel out of place in a more serious movie about adults with autism.

In trying to do the other aspects, however, the movie kind of falls apart. The first act is a mostly straightforward setup that you could be forgiven for thinking that it won’t even be a thriller. Wolff’s awkward bluntness around neuro-typicals is played for mild chuckles, because of course it is. Only at the end of it do we see that he’s a badass operator once he’s betrayed and people try to kill him. The second act where a government agent played by J.K. Simmons gives us a 10-minute exposition dump is pretty dull. There’s a hint of some romance between Wolff and a young accountant whose life he saved played by Anna Kendrick, but thankfully it’s never fully realized (“Gosh, I find your lack of social development and the way you cleanly killed the men who attacked me soooo sexy.”)

It’s only in the third act where he goes out to get the people who are after him where the movie becomes a wonderful nirvana of schlock, the “John Wick meets Rain Man” asploitation I hoped it would be. I’m not going to spoil too much, but it has the two funniest plot twists of any film this year, a solid 5 minutes where a caretaker at a home for autistic children gives a PSA about caring for people with disabilities, and a hilarious and completely unnecessary villainous monologue for the ages, courtesy of a paycheck-loving John Lithgow. My only complaint at that point were that there were no accounting-related one-liners in the film, including but not limited to:

- I just depreciated YOUR LIFE

- Don't write me off as a loss just yet

- They must be held accountable

- She's becoming a liability

- He's likes torturing people. He's accrual man

- A character named General Ledger

I don’t know. I chose a dull major, alright?

36. Moonlight – Clichéd dialogue and an annoying tendency to skip over some important/interesting events in the main character’s life, but empathetic performances, a great cast, and a good understanding and balance of the movie’s story and its’ theme of identity. I’m a bit of a tough nut to crack, emotionally speaking, so I feel like the subtle approach from this movie didn’t affect me as much as it did the many people who hail this film as the Second Coming of Christ.

35. Kill Zone 2 – Insane, jaw-dropping, balls-to-the-wall fight scenes that are too often hampered or outright interrupted by that silly and intrusive “plot” nonsense that unfortunately characterizes most post-Jackie Hong Kong kung-fu films. Still, any film that has Tony Jaa doing a flying double knee through a bus windshield and into the driver gets a recommendation from me.

34. Anthropoid – “War is not romantic”.

I’ve always held a soft spot for well-made genre films, and “Anthropoid”, a World War II thriller that, despite a title and poster that look like they belong to some sci-fi horror movie, is certainly that. “Anthropoid” is about a historical real-life mission by the Czech Resistance to assassinate a high-ranking Nazi official in occupied Prague. What I like about this movie is how solemn it is. None of the good guys are clear-eyed heroes who live happily ever after. These are anxious, grimly-professional saboteurs. Most of the resistance members question over whether killing one man is worth the possible consequences it would bring to the Czech people, while the two leads soldier on, determined to follow their orders. Cillian Murphy and the guy from “50 Shades of Grey” (Jamie Dornan) make for a likable pair of leads, and the characters feel human instead of movie-ish. Even during their romances with two local Prague women, it feels less like forced Hollywood trite and more like people trying to comfort each other in a hopelessly bleak environment.

The movie starts slow, but builds well to the more thrilling stuff. Interestingly (minor spoiler), the assassination attempt only occurs halfway through the movie, with the second half being the fallout and repercussions. A more generic movie would have ended with the assassination, before including text commending the bravery of the Czech Resistance and how their mission was successful, but “Anthropoid” instead shows and talks about the horrible things the Nazis did in retaliation, including killing thousands of Czech civilians, before showing what happens to the Resistance members involved in the assassination. I won’t ruin it, but the last half-hour of the movie is pretty devastating stuff.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with Anthropoid, as long as you don’t mind the slow build. It doesn’t really strive for greatness or deep meaning in any way. It’s just a well-made, well-acted, tense, bleak, and morally grey look at an important event in World War II and how it (and war in general) affects people. Bonus points for the cast actually making an effort to speak with Czech accents, instead of the usual historical non-British movie done entirely with British accents.

33. The Siege of Jadotville – Hey, speaking of solid genre flicks starring Jamie Dornan! I love a good war film, so when I heard that when Netflix produced one set during the Congo Crisis of the 1960’s, a refreshing change from the usual “popular” wars like WWII, ‘Nam, and Iraq/Afghanistan, my ears perked up. The plot is about an Irish company of UN peacekeepers who are sent to the tiny town of Jadotville in the resource-rich Congo during a period of upheaval and civil war. Murky politics and other UN operations in the area make things worse, and in retaliation the rebel government and French/Belgian mercenaries send a massive force to attack the isolated Irish troops.

There’s about 40 minutes of setup, in which we see the soldiers (led by Dornan), most of them still teenagers, at home before they get shipped off, we get a broad overview of the political climate in the Congo, including the coup leader and the UN representative sent to assist the central government (played by a shitty hairpiece with a Mark Strong attached to it), as well as the situation that led to tits going up for the peacekeepers. The remaining hour of the movie is the titular week-long siege, with the Irish defending a tactically disadvantaged position with limited food, ammo, and water against a very numerically superior enemy.

All of this is very well-crafted, with good pacing and editing, especially during the battle scenes, which are tense, harrowing, and filmed in a way that you actually get a solid idea of the geography of the siege. History, and even the movie at one point, both say that there were 150 UN troops at Jadotville, but it never seems like there's more than a few dozens of them. It's not a huge issue, but a little distracting.

The characters are pretty thin, with only a handful of the soldiers actually having names, and the writing is nothing special. It’s efficient in the sense that it gets the necessary information across and doesn’t intrude on the story, but it does have the usual clichés you see in a war film. The soldiers are portrayed as brave, noble, and heroic, while the UN leaders and generals are shown as callous, selfish, and incompetent. After some reading into the history, I found that this is not untrue, but it still feels like a conventional audience-pleasing dynamic. To the film’s credit however, it does a nice job of showing how morally grey the conflict was, without really claiming moral superiority for either side, but still makes you care for the UN soldiers at the heart of it. Even the trademark ending text is done tastefully and respectfully.

If you want a compelling, well-crafted war film and have a Netflix subscription, then “The Siege of Jadotville” is worth checking out. Between this and “Anthropoid”, Jamie Dornan has proven himself a capable (and wonderfully mustached) leading man, and in my eyes has done a good job getting his reputation back to “respectable” after “Fifty Shades of Grey” and...oh, there's two sequels to it coming out? Well, here's hoping for more good war films from the lad afterwards.

32. Doctor Strange – Same-old shit from Marvel, in terms of writing and story, but at least contains enough beautiful visuals and creativity to take away a good deal of the staleness. Bonus points for having a climax that is the exact opposite of a typical superhero destruction-fest.

31. The Magnificent Seven – At a film festival like TIFF, which is mainly meant for foreign, independent, arthouse films and prestige pictures, “The Magnificent Seven”, a remake of John Sturges’ 1960 original and an unapologetic, old-fashioned Western, stands out. As a genre-film aficionado, that appealed to me enough that I saw this movie even though it would come out in theaters a few weeks later.

And I’m glad I did. “The Magnificent Seven” is just plain, loud, over-the-top fun. If you see the trailer, the movie is exactly what you think it’ll be like. A woman seeks frontier justice against the power-hungry coal baron who terrorizes her town and murdered her husband, and pays a bounty hunter (Denzel Washington, who looks like he was born to play a cowboy in this movie) to go after him. He recruits 6 more outlaws, killers, and warriors to aid him in his quest to protect the honest townsfolk from the evil businessman and his army. Whiskey is drunk, guns are drawn, banter is exchanged, and lots of people get shot and blown up. Antoine Fuqua (an expert in making solid genre flicks) keeps the movie paced well, gives the characters breathing space to flesh out a bit, and makes the action loud, exciting, and well-filmed. No shaky-cam bullshit here, just good, efficient filmmaking with lots of nice Western vistas.

The cast is strong, especially Washington and Chris Pratt (who I worried would be out of place but acquits himself well here), along with solid supporting players. The writing is nothing special, but gets the job done, although there are some unfortunate missed opportunities at character development and payoffs, especially when it comes to Ethan Hawke’s (fabulously named) Goodnight Robicheaux, a former Confederate sharpshooter who hung up his guns. Also, a minor issue, but the film severely overplays how effective a mid-19th century gatling gun is.

There’s nothing altogether remarkable about this remake from a quality standpoint, but in a year filled with failed reboots and sequels and unremarkable superhero films, a good, solid personality-filled Western shoot-em-up about a multicultural team of badasses teaming up against the evil establishment is more than a welcome breath of fresh air.

30. Everybody Wants Some!! - Richard Linklater’s spiritual sequel to “Dazed and Confused” feels very much like a Richard Linklater film. There’s not much plot; it’s just about a college freshman baseball player and his team’s escapades over the weekend before the semester starts in the fall of 1980, as they hang out, go party, try to get laid, and attend their first practice. There’s no real structure to this film. It’s meandering in typical Linklater fashion, where the movie is more about the characters, the setting, and the dialogue. If you don’t mind this sort of thing, “Everybody Wants Some!!” is a very enjoyable movie. The characters and performances are on point, the banter is entertaining, the music is great (used especially well during a scene where the characters drive around town singing “Rapper’s Delight”) and even when Linklater waxes philosophical as he sometimes tends to, it feels less pretentious and more like the characters being themselves. When they talk about life, man, they’re often drunk or high or sleep-deprived, which feels like a nice bit of self-awareness from Linklataer. It even gets a bit inspirational at times, as the themes of finding out your identity and place in life and making the most of your short time on this Earth hits home surprisingly well. Funny, charming, and likable in every way that “Boyhood” wasn’t, “Everybody Wants Some!!” marks a welcome return to form for Richard Linklater, which is amazing considering it didn’t even take TWELVE YEARS to make.

29. Love & Friendship – Not being a big fan of hoity-toity costume dramas and having never read any of Jane Austen’s work, I really didn’t think this Austen adaptation would appeal to me. However, following the initial 10-15 minutes where my brain adjusted to the Regency-era English, I found that I really enjoyed this film. It’s a comedy of manners centered on a widowed socialite (played by the never-better Kate Beckinsale), a cunning and manipulative woman who is well-known as the best flirt in London, and her attempts to get her daughter married to a wealthy suitor as she herself juggles those in her social circles. I found myself loving the barbed interplay between well-written characters. The cast is uniformly excellent, with a strong performance by Beckinsale and a show-stealing turn from Tom Bennett as a wealthy but utterly gormless suitor, the kind of man who keeps talking even when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and who is completely enchanted by the “tiny green balls” at dinner (peas). The whole movie is kind of plotless, with very little narrative drive and it feels like important character developments are often skimmed over (two characters have a pleasant conversation in one scene and are married like, 5 minutes later). The whole movie feels very light, albeit very watchable. Watch it for the excellent cast, the lovely sets and costumes, and for the genuinely hilarious writing, but don’t expect to be all that invested in what happens. The whole thing feels like a dinner party with much wittier and politer versions of your extended family, albeit just as catty and spiteful.

28. Captain America: Civil War - By now most people have acknowledged the problems with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. While most are solid superhero flicks, they all feel kind of safe and sterile, films marked-tested to appeal to as large an audience as possible. While this leaves less room for error, it also limits how good they can become. If all you want is good actors wearing ridiculous costumes punching each other and destroy expensive CGI environments while mumbling groan-worthy quips, the MCU has got you covered. Those of us who want them to approach something like Raimi’s Spider-Man films or Nolan’s first two Batman films are often left wanting. Sometimes it has gotten better than the norm. The first half of “Captain America: The First Avenger” was excellent before it became kind of a rushed mess in the second. Shane Black’s “Iron Man 3” felt like the only genuinely auteur-driven film in the whole MCU (if only because so much of the humor is based on what Black and Downey Jr. accomplished in “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang”). “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” is still the high point of the MCU, a terrific and surprisingly character-driven action thriller that barely felt like a superhero flick. The point I’m laboriously trying to get to is that while “Civil War” for the most part takes itself seriously and actually approaches “Winter Soldier” levels of greatness, it can’t help but fall back on the lame, quippy, fanboy-masturbating sameness that has defined this cinematic universe since Joss Whedon first got involved with the franchise.

The plot is that a mysterious man frames Captain America’s friend Bucky for a terrorist attack, while Tony Stark feels guilty about collateral damage caused by the Avengers’ various battles and wants to sign some UN accord to make the Avengers government regulated, and tries to hunt Cap down when he goes rogue to try and protect Bucky. It’s pretty convoluted stuff if you’re not already caught up on the franchise, but not too difficult to follow. My main concern going into this film was that it’d be more of an “Avengers” film than a “Captain America” film. Cap’s films have a good track record, while the two Avengers movies are kinda crap. Thankfully, the heavy focus is on Cap and his efforts to protect Bucky from an increasingly hostile and angry Tony Stark. Despite what the marketing tries to say, the whole UN accord business feels minor at best, only there for a #WhoseSideAreYouOn hashtag to appease the autists who want their precious comic-book to be faithfully adapted. The story is surprisingly engaging, and while the aforementioned mysterious man is the real villain and does an effective job, the role of antagonist is actually filled really well by Iron Man. The characters are given enough room that pretty much everyone in the ensemble gets a moment to shine, the pacing is good, and (despite the Russo Brothers’ annoying use of shaky-cam and fast editing) the action scenes are solid and actually serve a purpose. It was almost a great “Captain America” film. And then Spider-Man shows up.

Spider-Man was added to this film halfway through filming due to Marvel striking a deal with Sony Pictures for the rights to the character, and his crowbarring into the movie is really obvious. There’s a whole half-hour of the movie that he’s in, where from introduction to the big punch-up at the airport to his exit, it feels like a completely different film, filled with the aforementioned light-hearted quippy humor that pretty much completely dissolves all tension, momentum, and conflict that movie had done a pretty good job building up to that point. It’s not bad in and of itself, but it feels like it suddenly became an “Avengers” movie, a big-budget re-enactment of a 10-year-old boy playing with his action figures. The only reason I don’t despise this part of the movie is because it at least has a few genuinely funny moments (most of them courtesy of Paul Rudd’s Ant-Man). The film recovers fairly well from this, and actually serves up a strong and pretty emotional climax that isn’t just wanton CGI destruction, but it still left a bad taste in my mouth, like I was bukkake’d by neo-nerd hipsters while sleeping and managed to clean myself off but the stains on my soul remained.

Look, I’ve said a bunch of negative (and some disgusting) things about this movie and the MCU in general, but “Civil War” is overall a good movie. The character work is strong, it’s occasionally funny, the cast is mostly terrific, and it’s definitely in the upper-echelon of this franchise. But the things that hold this series back (the sameness, the dull visuals, the lack of stakes, circlejerking, etc.) hold this movie back as well. Who knows? Once they’re done with this phase of the MCU, they can actually start to experiment and not just make the same kind of movie over and over, because let’s face it; people will come see these anyway. Hell, give me a She-Hulk movie directed by David Lynch, or a blaxploitation-style origin story about Nick Fury starring Michael Jai White, or a musical romantic-comedy about Squirrel Girl directed by George Miller. I don’t know. I’d rather see any of those than ANOTHER GODDAMN SPIDER-MAN REBOOT.

27. Train to Busan – Pretty much what you’d expect, plot and character-wise, from a zombie movie, but damned if South Korea doesn’t possess some of the finest film directors in the world, and Yeon Sang-Ho brings his A-game to revitalize an appropriately undead genre. Great cast, intense and creative set-pieces, and a nicely emotional focus on character. I’m not Korean, so I’m not sure if there’s any satire or message involved (the film does seem like a pretty accurate depiction of South Korea when StarCraft II servers go down). Somewhat dragged down by iffy CGI and the hair-pulling stupidity and dickheadedness of main human antagonist, who makes “The Walking Dead” Season 2-era Shane seem like a rational and believable fellow.

26. Fences – Little more than a filmed play, but a well-filmed one bolstered by good writing and knockout performances from Denzel Washington and Viola Davis. About 20 minutes too long.

25. Arrival - Canadian director Denis Villeneuve has been making quite the reputation for himself in recent years for his mature and well-crafted thrillers. While I find his movies just a touch overrated, I do admire a lot in them, from the technical craft to his ability to command strong performances out of all of his actors. This year’s “Arrival” continues that trend, marking his most mature film to date and one of the extremely rare mainstream hard science-fiction movies to come out these days. This is not a movie about laser battles and space explosions and sticking your tongue down the throats of hot human-looking alien babes (I’m excited for “Mass Effect: Andromeda”, alright?), but about communication.

Several banana-shaped alien spacecraft touch down at random points around the earth without any apparent motive or pattern, and countries around the globe bring experts together to try and communicate with them. The plot centers around linguistics professor Amy Adams, who is brought in by the military along with a physicist played by Jeremy Renner to head into the alien craft in America to try and set up communications with the aliens. It’s a neat perspective to see one of these alien contact movies from someone trying to understand them rather than fight them, and Amy Adams turns in another strong performance as a woman who is experiencing a personal crisis while being at the very center of a worldwide phenomenon. The rest of the cast is good too, but this is her movie to command, and she does so with ease.

While Villeneuve no longer has Roger Deakins as director of photography to rely on, he and his new DP Bradford Young make this a very strikingly beautiful movie, filled with bleak subdued colors but with an astonishing sense of scale. The scene where Amy Adams enters the alien craft for the first time is outstanding, with the camera work, lighting, and environment doing a genuinely amazing job conveying how…well, alien the ship feels. I also like the design of the aliens themselves (a sort-of cross between the facehuggers from “Alien” and the Reapers from “Mass Effect”), a refreshing change from the humanoid aliens you typically see in sci-fi.

The plot is surprisingly brainy, primarily concerned with the process of establishing of communication and later a very different perception of time and choice from how we typically perceive them. It’s not too difficult to wrap your head around this stuff, but you do have to pay attention, because this isn’t a movie that dumbs itself down or holds your hand.

As much as I admire and enjoyed the movie, I do have a criticism, and it’s that the whole thing feels…cold. I don’t just mean the color palette or the really strong air conditioning in the theater where I watched it. I mean emotionally cold. I’ve heard a lot of people praise how emotional the film is, but it didn’t really affect me all that much. Even the scenes with Amy Adams and her daughter, no matter how Malick-y they’re shot, felt mostly like salad dressing to try and make the audience connect with the main character. Even when you (no-spoiler) find out the plot significance of these scenes, I liked it much more on an intellectual level than on a gut-level. Also, and this part is hard to explain without spoilers, but there’s a love story that’s pretty crucial to the theoretical concepts later in the film that feels comically underdeveloped, like we’re supposed to believe these people fall in love despite working with each other for a few days and rarely talking about anything other than work (and because they’re attractive movie stars, of course). Plus, there are quite a few annoyingly clichéd characters, like the fear-mongering radio talk show host, the weary and no-nonsense military man, and a Chinese officer named General Shang who apparently rules the entire country of China without answering to anybody.

Despite these niggles, I still liked “Arrival” a lot. It attempts (and in my mind strongly succeeds) to present a realistic scenario of what alien contact would be like in today’s political and cultural climate, and again, it’s really refreshing to see a science-fiction film where science, communication and peace are used for conflict resolution as opposed to violence. It’s really ambitious on both a thematic level and a technical one (the special effects in this movie are some of the most seamless and believable I’ve ever seen), and even the problems I have with the writing don’t distract from Denis Villeneuve’s directorial talent. Here’s hoping he doesn’t screw up the new “Blade Runner”.

24. Shin Godzilla – Lacks the awe-inspiring visuals and sense of scale of Gareth Edwards’ “Godzilla” (which I forgive because this had like 1/10th the budget), but makes up for it with a richer story and sense of humanity. Whereas that film is about our powerlessness at the hands of giant monsters, this one is more about working together to overcome it. What begins as a bureaucratic farce eventually gives way to the Japanese government putting aside any squabbles and politics to focus on saving the lives of its citizens from a giant, rampaging lizard. It’s kind of inspiring to see a movie like this where a government tries to prevent destruction instead of causing it (with a not-so-subtle pisstake of the Americans, whose contribution to the efforts amounts to little more than bombing and almost nuking Tokyo). Plus, Godzilla himself is awesome here, looking and acting like a genuine monster, and pulled off with a nice mix of practical and digital effects (other than his initial form where he looks like a retarded CGI iguana with googly eyes). Kickass soundtrack, as well.

23. War on Everyone – “I’ve always wondered; if you hit a mime (with a car), does he make a sound?” Michael Peña’s character wonders out loud at the start of the movie, right before he and his partner (and driver) find out. Within one minute of the movie, you already know if it’s for you or not. “War on Everyone” is about two cops (Peña and Alexander Skarsgård) who are as corrupt as they come. They regularly blackmail and beat up suspects, take bribes, and drink on the job. They never really try to justify this behavior. Their attitude can be best summed up by a line Skarsgård says before getting into the driver’s seat of a car while piss-drunk; “Let’s go fuck some scumbags.” There’s some plot about their investigation into a robbery/murder orchestrated by the guy from those shitty “Divergent” movies who looks like discount-Toby Kebbell, but the plot feels like an afterthought. It’s more so about the two characters and their antics and their musings on life, greatly enlivened by the excellent performances and chemistry of the two leads, as well as the cracking, pitch-black funny script from writer/director John Michael McDonagh (who also made the fantastic Irish gems “Calvary” and “The Guard”). This feels like if McDonagh made a Shane Black film. It’s not a powerful meditation on faith and morality like “Calvary” and it’s not a great character-study like “The Guard”, but “War on Everyone” shows that even a lower-tier McDonagh film is still as hilarious and biting as they come, and it even comes with a bit of heart and soul. Still, definitely not recommended to the easily-offended. It feels kind of pointless, but I could listen to McDonagh characters talk shit to each other all day.

22. 10 Cloverfield Lane - I will try to be as spoiler-free as possible in this review. Honestly, if you STILL haven’t seen it and want to, just go watch it and know that it definitely comes recommended.

I’ll admit it; even though I wasn’t a huge fan of the shaky-cam monster-athon that was “Cloverfield”, the mysterious and vague trailer for “10 Cloverfield Lane” got me properly hyped up as I tried to figure out the connection between the two movies. In an unusual twist, most of the movie is only tangentially a work of science-fiction. The plot is about a young woman named Michelle who runs away from home as some vague disaster occurs. She’s knocked out, and wakes up in an underground survival shelter run by a paranoid survivalist named Howard, along with a young guy named Emmett. Howard says that there has been a massive attack, but Michelle is skeptical and is unsure if Howard is trustworthy or crazy.

The bulk of the film is in the bunker, as the trio try to cope with the various realities of living in a survival shelter, including each other. This entire section is excellent. Deftly alternating between lighthearted bonding, uncomfortable comedy, and pressure-cooker intensity, debut director Dan Trachtenberg shows he is an expert when it comes to tone, pacing, and atmosphere, further enlivened by Bear McCreary’s terrific score. Even better is the main trio of actors, all of whom play off of each other well and really flesh out their characters. The guy who plays Emmett displays a dopey likability that suits the character well, while Mary Elizabeth Winstead makes Michelle much more intelligent, tough and compelling than your average "horror" protagonist (I use that term broadly). Powerfully commanding the whole movie is John Goodman, who easily makes Howard sympathetic at times and genuinely terrifying at others. This is a brilliantly batshit performance by one of our very best character actors, and even if the rest of the production wasn’t up to par (which it definitely is), he alone would make this film worth watching.

The reason this movie isn’t higher on my list is because of the last 10-or-so minutes. Without going into detail (and the trailer gives this away anyway), Michelle leaves the bunker by the end. It’s like the entire film gets wrapped up and ends satisfyingly, but then it goes on for another 10 minutes that feels like a completely different movie with a whiplash-inducing change in tone. It’s all still skillfully made and well-acted, but the effect just feels bizarre if you’re watching it for the first time. At first I thought the sequence was there to connect it to the first “Cloverfield” and make it a semi-sequel, but it’s too vague for me to buy it.

Maybe it is all some continuous “Cloverfield” universe, or better yet, it’s an anthology film series in the vain of “The Twilight Zone” or “Black Mirror”, one where talented up-and-coming directors make unique sci-fi thrillers. If that’s the case, it’s best not to read too much into the ending, and to just try and accept the movie as a standalone despite the jarring tonal shift at the end. One thing I actually quite liked about the ending is that it satisfyingly concludes Michelle’s character arc, making her a surprisingly well-developed protagonist that has actually grown by the end. Maybe if I watch this again (and I do plan to), I’ll like it more and probably give it a higher spot on the list, but even on a first impression, “10 Cloverfield Lane” is an engaging and balls-tighteningly tense thriller with a top-notch cast and production working at the top of their game. John Goodman is so good, man.

21. London Has Fallen – Holy hell, where do I even begin? Rare is the movie where I honestly cannot tell if it’s trying to be a comedy or not. It has a serious post-9/11 depiction of terrorism, but it treats all the bad guys like cannon fodder to be disposed of in spectacular ways. It has some lines about the consequences of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, but these lines are throwaway at best and never brought up again. It tries to somewhat humanize its villains, but it also has Gerard Butler executing a wheel-chair bound terrorist before going on a tirade about how they’ll never win and that America will still be standing in a thousand years (not sure if the Third Reich comparison is intentional).

The action scenes are competently shot/staged, if unremarkable (despite a fun CGI-assisted long-take shootout). The script feels like it was either written in a weekend or improvised on the spot by Butler and company. In fact, I feel like this wasn’t originally written as a sequel to “Olympus Has Fallen”. None of the previous movie’s events are referenced, and all the recurring cast members (save for Butler and Aaron Eckhart) feel like glorified crowbarred-in cameos. It’s absurd to have a White House cabinet of Oscar winners/nominees and give them all a collective 5 minutes of screen-time. I’m pretty sure Oscar-winner Melissa Leo doesn’t even have any lines. I’m sure the paycheck was nice, at least. The first 15 minutes or so are fairly boring, even if things pick up considerably afterwards.

The one indisputable quality this movie has is Gerard Butler. Butler gives a genuinely jaw-dropping performance as bloodthirsty and very likely insane Secret Service agent Mike Banning (our hero, naturally). Mike Banning is the type of guy who reacts to getting shot in the shoulder and the birth of his child with roughly the same facial expression. Mike Banning is the type of guy who despite being very proficient with and usually having convenient access to firearms, frequently elects to brutally stab the bad guys numerous times with a combat knife. (“Was that really necessary?” President Aaron Eckhart asks after Banning slowly stabs a terrorist in the ribs to death while making his brother listen via walkie-talkie. “No”, Banning bluntly admits.) Even from the peaceful initial scenes of him accompanying the President on a jog or talking to his wife, you can tell something is very off about him. We as the audience are of course expecting/awaiting shit to hit the fan, but Butler is nearly trembling with anticipation to start murdering terrorists during these scenes. Butler makes almost every bit of dialogue sound like a badass one-liner, on one occasion offering the President a glass of water while saying “I don’t know about you, but I’m thirsty as fuck”, spewing the word “fuck” out of the side of his mouth like a shotgun blast. Even on the off-chance that the movie isn’t taking the piss, Butler most definitely is. I’m not being ironic when I say that this is one of the great comic performances of our time, and the success of the movie (for me) is due to the movie being centered around Butler and his hilariously absurd machoism.

The director of this movie is an Iranian who escaped his war-torn home to Sweden as a boy. This, coupled with Butler’s performance, Butler and Eckhart’s borderline-homoerotic bromance, the ridiculous one-liners and speeches, and an indefensibly heroic portrayal of drone-warfare, makes me feel like “London Has Fallen” is really one big satire of U.S. foreign policy subtly disguised as a stupid, offensive action movie, something conservative idiots will applaud, liberal idiots will condemn, and fun, smart, attractive people will appreciate and enjoy for what it is. I saw this and “Gods of Egypt” with a few friends as a sort of once-in-a-lifetime Gerard Butler double-feature, and I had a grand time.

I felt like I could smell this movie, and I like that. Watching “London Has Fallen” is like sex; You wouldn’t want someone walking in on you during, and you’ll probably want to take a shower afterwards, but once you get past the initial foreplay, it’s a great time from start to raucous, bloody finish.

Wow, that metaphor got gross in a hurry.

20. The Witch – I put off watching “The Witch” because every time in the past few years that people heralded the newest “great, modern horror film” (It Follows, The Babadook, etc.), I found them to be massively overrated and even a bit disappointing, even despite their good qualities. After finally seeing it, I can safely say that it’s definitely one of the best horror films in years (which isn’t saying much, but still).

The story is of an early 17th century Puritan family who get exiled from their village and set up a farm in an isolated area near the woods. Strange supernatural things start happening to them, and the movie becomes the gradual degradation of their mental states, as they start to blame and fight amongst each other, not unlike my beloved “The Thing”.

This is a very atmospheric, slow-burning kind of horror. The emphasis is on creeping dread rather than murdering attractive 20-something teenagers. For a first-time filmmaker, director Robert Eggers shows an excellent grasp of pacing, tone, and visual storytelling. Once you get used to the historical Ye Olde English manner in which the characters speak (subtitles are recommended), the writing is surprisingly quite good, with well-defined characters with clear conflicts and motivations. The acting ensemble is terrific. The whole movie is pretty much just two parents, a teenage daughter, an adolescent boy, and two young children, and they are all fantastic. Seriously, as someone who despises children (both in real life and in film), this is some of the best child-acting I’ve ever seen.

My problem with the movie is that (and this is kind of a spoiler, but it happens early in the film) I was hoping that it wouldn’t be clear whether or not the supernatural stuff is actually happening, or if the family is just losing their minds because of some clever metaphor or allegory. But no, it’s revealed pretty early on that it is actually supernatural stuff, which takes away some of the surprise and the suspense. The music is the kind of discordant “unnerving” string-heavy stuff you’d expect in a horror movie, and I often felt that silence would be much more effective during the scenes it’s used in.  Also, without giving away anything, the ending is pretty silly. It wraps up the story and the character arc of the lead character (the teenage daughter), but the manner in which it does it felt kind of over-the-top. You know what, though? I honestly thought we would get some shitty, cop-out, cut-to-black ending 5 minutes earlier, so it’s not that big of a deal. I’ll take a retarded ending over a non-ending any day of the week.

“The Witch” is a horror movie for those who don’t like horror movies, and one that treats its audience with intelligence and respect, and (the last few minutes notwithstanding) is actually satisfying and builds well to its climax. As someone who doesn’t care much for horror movies, I would say that “The Witch” lives up to the hype, and is well-worth checking out. Also, best (and surprisingly similar) use of a goat since Sam Raimi’s “Drag Me to Hell”.

19. Nocturnal Animals – A problem a lot of movies have for me in particular is when they’re tonally or stylistically inconsistent, feeling like two separate movies at odds with each other. Tom Ford’s “Nocturnal Animals” is a rare example of a movie with strikingly different stories complementing each other and actually improving the end product. The film is about a LA art exhibitor played by Amy Adams, who has an unhappy personal life despite her successful professional life. One day, her long-estranged ex-husband sends her a copy of his upcoming novel, a violent thriller about a family man terrorized by hillbillies in West Texas. The movie cuts between the novel’s story, Adams’ current life, and her past relationship with the ex-husband.

Tom Ford showed with his debut “A Serious Man” that he was great at filming and telling a story about people in rich houses being sad, as he does here, but also displays an uncanny talent at filming a gritty desert-set revenge tale. The parallels between the real life story and the novel are very finely drawn, and while I found the novel sections much more gripping than the Amy Adams story, the seemingly-disparate styles and tones never clash and instead fit really well with each other, creating a movie that is more than the sum of its parts. For a fashion designer, it’s surprising how good of a writer and director Tom Ford is, and he shows that “A Single Man” wasn’t just beginner’s luck.

Also helping the movie is the fantastic cast. Jake Gyllenhaal gives one of his best performances as both the ex-husband and the protagonist of the novel story, and Amy Adams shows incredible nuance and subtlety, reminding us why she is one of the best actresses working today. Michael Shannon steals the show for me (yes, I love him and I’m biased, shut up) as a shady detective in the novel’s story. All the supporting players are great as well, even if their roles aren’t as meaty.

My main complaints are that the dialogue is sometimes silly, some of the supporting characters are pretty one-dimensional and cartoonish (Amy Adam’s current-day husband played by Armie Hammer is a distant businessman who has to go away to New York to “make that very important sale”), and that the editing is a little wonky and overdone at some minor points. I initially had mixed-feelings about the ending, feeling that it was a bit anticlimactic and expected more to happen, but after thinking about it and how it ties to the movie’s themes and character relationships, I like it a lot more in retrospect. Unlike the movie, I can’t think of a good way to wrap this review up, but I’ll say that “Nocturnal Animals” is engaging, unique, and worth checking out, so let’s move on.

18. The Wailing – Its imposing length and frustrating lack of resolution/clarity can be hard to overcome for some people, but this South Korean supernatural horror flick is (in terms of acting, writing, directing, pacing, editing, themes, and just plain scariness and dread) the best and most effective horror film in quite a while. Like a bloodier and more emotionally tormenting version of “The Witch”.

17. La La Land – Before some of you call for my beheading for placing “La La Land” this “low” on my list, let me begin by saying that I still enjoyed the damn thing. From a purely technical perspective, “La La Land” is hands-down one of the best films of the year. Damien Chazelle’s immaculate direction perfectly captures the nostalgic sense one gets from watching old Hollywood musicals. This, coupled with terrific musical numbers and game actors makes “La La Land” an easy movie to enjoy. The story, however, is where the movie is a bit shaky.

The plot is about a down-on-their-luck aspiring actress and jazz pianist who fall in love while pursuing their dreams, and struggle to deal with the reality of keeping their relationship together while their paths go in different directions. The movie goes for a contrast between a magical, cheery Hollywood musical and a more grounded, dramatic approach, but for most of the movie it doesn’t quite gel as well as one would hope. I loved the first half of the movie, where it’s an extravagant musical about aspiring artists, but halfway through, it kind of jarringly becomes a relationship drama, with hardly any musical numbers, and this part seriously drags. It’s only near the end where Emma Stone sings her big “Give me an Oscar, goddammit” number that I even remembered this movie was supposed to be a musical. It’s like the movie takes two different approaches to its material, whereas one middle-ground approach (keep the big musical bits throughout but make them gradually more dramatic) would have made the movie a lot better, in my opinion. It doesn’t help that the two lead characters just aren’t very interesting. Don’t get me wrong; Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling try their damnedest here, but it feels more like two likable actors playing parts instead of real people with flaws and humanity, a feeling exacerbated by them not even having that good a chemistry.

If you can put up with an uneven viewing experience long enough, the film rewards you with one of the best endings I’ve seen in years, one where the themes, motivations, and songs are meshed together in a perfectly bittersweet sequence that actually makes up for a lot of the film’s flaws, and the one point in the film where the aforementioned contrast between fantasy and reality is perfectly in sync with the filmmaking style. It’s here where it stops being a movie about struggling artists and becomes something grander; a film about following your dreams but realizing that life never really works out the way you intend. This and the opening single-take number are ones for the ages, and make the film worth watching all by themselves. To put it in a one-sentence review, “La La Land” is still a case of a movie musical being really good in the first half but fizzling out in the second (something which happened in every one I’ve ever seen besides the “South Park” movie), but at least it recovers well enough to leave a positive impression.

16. The Shallows – I’m as surprised as you that this “hot-girl-gets-attacked-by-shark” film is this high up on my list, but here we are. Blake Lively plays said hot girl, a medical student who travels to an isolated beach in Mexico as a sort of spiritual journey/tribute to her deceased mother, and before long gets shark’d and stranded a few hundred feet from shore on some rocks during low-tide. I thought this would be the sort of cheeky, “Piranha 3D”-esque exploitation flick, but “The Shallows” actually has enough confidence to take itself fairly seriously. The main character has intelligence and some depth and even an arc (as obvious as it may be), and she’s buoyed by Lively’s terrific and believable performance. The shark is intimidating and scary, even when it’s not onscreen. The film has a good sense of progression, gradually escalating the threat level before arriving at the admittedly over-the-top but highly entertaining finale. It has a scene of the main character performing surgery on herself, which for some morbid reason I’ve always enjoyed seeing in movies and shows. And to top it all off, there’s a seagull that befriends the main character as she’s stranded, played by an actual trained seagull whose reactions (and lack thereof) are hilarious and his role in the plot surprisingly affecting. This seems like a stupid thing to harp on about, but if there was an Oscar for Best Performance by an Animal, Sully the Seagull’s performance as Steven Seagull would easily take home the prize.

There are a few issues, like how the main character tends to speak too much to herself (i.e. the audience) about her situation, and while I didn’t hate the very end of the movie, I do wish the film had ended a minute or two earlier right when it had a perfect moment to do so, instead of going on with an epilogue. However, given the expectations I had going in, director Jaume Collet-Serra uses Blake Lively’s good looks and strong acting ability, the beautiful camerawork and setting, his storytelling skills, and an adorable seagull to blow those expectations completely out of the water (har-har).

15. The Handmaiden – Gorgeously filmed, lurid, and thoroughly entertaining Korean erotic thriller with strong performances, writing, and a wonderfully dark sense of humor (an attempted hanging scene yielded one of the year’s biggest laughs for me). Strikes a good balance between artful grace and trashy pulp.

14. Silence – Of the 2016 films in which an accented and deeply religious Andrew Garfield has his faith tested by horrific violence committed by the Japanese, I like “Hacksaw Ridge” more, but this is still a powerful and deeply personal look at faith from Martin Scorsese. A challenging movie, but rewarding if you put in the effort to understand it thematically. A bit overlong and repetitive in the middle portion (though this is probably intentional), and I feel like the movie would be better if Garfield and Adam Driver switched roles, but from the moment Liam Neeson comes back into the movie, it’s outstanding to the end.

13. The Dressmaker – In the early ‘50s, a bus rolls into a tiny, rural Australian town that looks like something out of a Western. Out steps Kate Winslet, accompanied by a Morricone-esque guitar and violin, immaculately dressed and carrying a sewing machine in her case, who proceeds to light up a cigarette and say “I’m back, you bastards.”

Two minutes in and you already know you’re in for a fun movie. Winslet plays a dressmaker who returns to her hometown after being banished as a child to care for her cantankerous mother (Judy Davis), and before long, dredges up a lot of bad blood among the townsfolk that hurt and humiliated her years ago. To say any more would be to spoil the wonderful weirdness that emanates from this film. “The Dressmaker” blends family melodrama, Western, comedy that ranges from the dark to the surreal to the slapstick, campiness, tragedy, romance, and revenge. It’s a mess, sure, but it struts along with such confidence in itself and its source material that all these seemingly disparate elements miraculously work together, for the most part. It helps that Winslet and Davis are so excellent that they deftly maneuver through all these tones and keep you engaged in what’s happening. It’s tough to say what kind of person I’d recommend this to, but I’ll say this; If you’ve always wanted an Australian Western version of “Twin Peaks” where the protagonist is a female couturier instead of a male gunslinger, then “The Dressmaker” will quench that extremely particular thirst.

A note on why I consider Kate Winslet to be one the best actors in the business: SHE IS A FOREIGN ACTOR THAT NAILS A PERFECT AUSTRALIAN ACCENT.

12. 20th Century Women – Mike Mills somewhat tones down the quirkiness from “Beginners”, but still delivers a personal, heartfelt, and funny portrayal of humanity, here subverting the typical coming-of-age story of his teenage boy self-insert protagonist by focusing the film on the women in his life and how their feminist strength and independence help shape him as he grows up. Fantastic performances from Annette Bening and Greta “Love of my Life” Gerwig.

11. Moana – Beautiful visuals, wonderful music, top-notch voice acting, and a compelling and even touching story. I was pleasantly surprised by how long the movie took to set up the characters and their relationships and individual personalities before diving into the adventure. Even the stuff I normally find annoying in Disney movies (needless action scenes, cute animal sidekicks, hip modern references) are toned down here. Maui (voiced by The Rock, who has more charisma than the ocean has water, and a nice singing voice to boot) is extremely entertaining, but Moana is surprisingly a compelling character herself, someone who has aspirations and flaws and a sense of agency, as opposed to the usual dull Disney heroines who unwillingly fall into their fate before falling in love with Prince Flawless McGeneric. Great, empowering message (especially for young girls) about forging your own path in life. A million bonus points for not giving Moana a forced love interest. Another million points for Jemaine Clement as a giant, singing crab. Best animated film of 2016 by a wide margin. Disney’s best non-Pixar movie since “Lilo & Stitch”. Probably my favorite Disney Princess movie. I don’t care what anyone says; “Moana” was fucking lit.

10. Eddie the Eagle – One thing I’ve noticed about myself lately is how sick I am of “irony”. Not in the dramatic sense, but in the “replacing sincerity and any genuine feeling with some detached sense of humor” sense. I think it was the inexplicable but somehow expected rise in popularity of a meme involving a dead gorilla that did it for me. But my point is, lately I’ve been finding myself watching movies otherwise labeled as “corny” or “cheesy” by jaded, cynical and emotionally detached people, who do so just because said movies believe in their own stories without shame or self-referential humor. Well, fuck those people. They can rot in hell along with their precious gorilla.

“Eddie the Eagle” is about Michael “Eddie” Edwards, a British skier who despite having very little experience and natural talent managed through sheer determination and willpower to accomplish his dream of competing in the 1988 Winter Olympics. Eddie comes from a working class family with a loving, supportive mother and a stern, disapproving father. Despite being a talented skier, he is rejected by Olympic board members due to his uncouth and dopey nature. He realizes that he still has a chance of making it onto the Olympic team as a ski-jumper, since the British have not competed in the sport in several decades, so he runs away to Europe to start training, where he meets an alcoholic former ski-jumper-turned-snow-groomer that helps him train.

This film has pretty much every inspirational sports cliché imaginable, from the plucky loser underdog, to the grumpy mentor, to the uplifting synthesizer music, to the late moments where the protagonist is at his lowest point and wants to give up, and so on. In many cases these would be negatives. However, the movie embraces these clichés instead of trying to shy away from them, and in doing so it feels so sincere and full of heart that it actually works. You acknowledge the unoriginality, but you find yourself rooting for Eddie to succeed so much that you just don’t care. Dexter Fletcher’s direction is spirited and full of energy, the aforementioned synth music by Matthew Margeson is wonderful, and the two lead performances by Taron Egerton as Eddie and Hugh Jackman as his mentor are excellent. The movie isn’t all that historically accurate. The real Eddie Edwards himself said that “only about 5%” of the film is true, and even the tagline is “Inspired by a dream come true”, rather than “Based on a true story”. But as a Huffington Post critic said, “You can't believe most of it, but you can believe in it. That's a subtle but important difference.”

But do you want to know why this movie is so high up on my list? So many movies over the years have been praised as “emotional” and “tear-jerking” and to me ended up feeling manipulative and artificial (*cough*Room*cough*). “Eddie the Eagle”, however, with all its sincerity and heart and feel-good splendor, touched me so much that I actually cried at the end. I can count the movies that made me genuinely cry on one hand, and this is the only one that has ever made me cry tears of joy instead of sadness. If the ending scene at the airport doesn’t melt your heart, then congratulations on not having one.

9. Hunt for the Wilderpeople - Due to my continual disappointment in my usual preferred genres of film in 2016, I started to branch out a bit and check out films I otherwise normally wouldn’t, one of which is New Zealand coming-of-age comedy drama “Hunt for the Wilderpeople”. The plot is about a young juvenile delinquent boy and his grumpy foster father who, due to odd circumstances, find themselves hunted by the law and escape to “the bush”, the vast New Zealand forests. We follow them as the two survive, get into various misadventures, and face off with an obsessed child services worker. To reveal any more would be to spoil this wonderful movie. Suffice it to say I enjoyed the hell out of it. Rarely do you encounter a movie that does adventure, buddy comedy, or tragic drama this well, let alone one that does all three, while at the same time showing interesting aspects of Kiwi culture and the beautiful landscape without feeling like a travelogue. The boy (Julian Dennison) starts off as annoying, but this is intentional rather than the fault of bad acting, and he not only grows on you but also shows a good deal of comic timing and emotional range. Sam Neill as the grumpy foster dad gives a career-best performance, showing the kind of depth I didn’t expect from someone who I think I’ve only ever seen in the “Jurassic Park” movies. Honestly, I recommend this film to pretty much anyone (that has access to subtitles). It’s funny, touching, creative, and lovely to look at. Between this and “What We Do in the Shadows”, writer/director Taika Waititi has given me just the slightest bit of hope that “Thor: Ragnarok” will actually be good.

8. Paterson – Wonderfully understated, warm, and compassionate ode to the passion and creativity found in everyday life, making even the smallest mundanities feel profound and moving. No story arc or big dramatic moments to speak of; just the story of a quiet but observant bus driver/poet and his seemingly unremarkable but, well, poetic life. The relationship between Adam Driver and his wife (Golshifteh Farahani) is one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen in a movie. Also; casting Adam Driver as a bus driver? Bravo, Jim Jarmusch.

7. The Nice Guys – I can’t believe I used to not care for Ryan Gosling. Granted, for the longest time the only movie I’d seen him in was “Drive”, and it’s hard to take someone seriously as an actor when all the role asks of someone is to stare silently for uncomfortably long periods and occasionally hit people. But nonetheless, in recent years the guy has done phenomenal work and completely won me over as an actor, culminating in Shane Black’s “The Nice Guys”, where he gives his best performance to date. He is shockingly funny and provides not only a lot of the laughs in this movie, but also a good deal of its heart. He’s gotten a lot of awards attention for his role in “La La Land”, but to me this is the highlight of his career so far.

Gosling plays an alcoholic, bumbling private detective and single father who teams up with the low-rent enforcer who broke his arm (Russell Crowe) to crack a major conspiracy involving a missing girl and a dead porn star. Tagging along for much of the mystery is Gosling’s teenage daughter, played by Angourie Rice in one of the best child performances I’ve ever seen in a movie (damning with faint praise, but still, give her credit), easily holding her own in scenes with Gosling and Crowe, despite a few awkward line deliveries. The three leads are great and have excellent chemistry with each other and with the strong supporting cast, helped along by Black’s hilarious dialogue, irreverent sense of humor, and his continuing growth as a director. I already harped on this in previous reviews, but it’s really refreshing to see a comedy that actually sets its jokes up before giving them a good payoff, especially one where some setups aren’t initially obvious (a seemingly throwaway story about Richard Nixon ended up giving me one of the biggest laughs of the year later on).

There’s kind of a lack of urgency to the mystery that makes the pacing a bit lethargic. I didn’t mind it much because the characters are so likable that you don’t mind spending time with them, but it’s worth mentioning. While there’s some character conflict and growth, I wish it tied into the plot a bit more. The lack of a clear antagonist for the first half of the movie also hurts. There are a lot of jokes and visual gags, and while most work, a few do fall flat. I feel like an extra rewrite and some tighter editing could fix most of these problems, and none of them are by any means a deal-breaker.

It feels weird to call this film “original”, since it’s more or less the same film Shane Black’s been making for the past 30 years, but in an increasingly bland world of mainstream filmmaking, it’s so refreshing to see a unique voice like Black do his own thing with a great cast and a solid budget. It’s a damn shame that a film which should’ve led to some sequels instead just barely made its’ production budget back. Put it another way; if you complain about a lack of originality in Hollywood but still paid money to see the latest superhero flick instead of “The Nice Guys”, please dip your head into a bucket of wet cement until the bubbles stop.

6. Hacksaw Ridge – I’m willing to go on record and say that “Hacksaw Ridge” is probably the most violent movie I’ve ever seen (at least the most violent since the last Mel Gibson movie). Considering this, only Mad Mel can make such an insanely violent film while also telling a moving story about one man’s faith and adherence to pacifism. The story is about Desmond Doss, a conscientious objector and pacifist who wanted to serve his country as a combat medic, and whose extraordinary rescue of over 70 soldiers during the Battle of Okinawa became the stuff of legend and earned him a Medal of Honor.

The movie has kind of a typical biopic structure, showing his early years as a troublesome lad who finds meaning in life with Christianity, to his young adult days where he tries to romance his impossibly attractive later-wife, before moving to the boot camp scenes where he’s persecuted by others for his refusal to pick up a gun, and finally to the war scenes. The transition between corny but solid, old-fashioned melodrama (or MEL-odrama) and the incredible, surreal, horrific war stuff may sound jarring, but in a very smart move, Gibson opens the film with a slow-motion montage of combat with a narration from Doss. This seems kind of clichéd, but it sets your mind up to expect the stuff you’ll see later, while at the same time taking away none of the impact.

Contrary to what some may think about the film and of Gibson going in, it’s not one of those shitty “Christians are good, others suck” films that do remarkably well in the southern states. The subject of the film is deeply religious and the film has its fair share of unsubtle Christ-like imagery, sure, but not only does it not beat you over the head with it, it even feels earned after seeing what Doss is put through. Plus, if anything, it’s less about the strength of faith and more about sticking to your convictions even when the whole world tests you. Plus, it’s refreshing for a war movie to heroically portray a man who saved lives instead of taking them.

Despite being away from the director’s chair for a decade, Gibson has lost none of his storytelling prowess or his penchant for striking imagery. The period and technical detail is fantastic (during one scene where you see through the scope of a Japanese sniper rifle, the film even got the scope right). Despite having to fill the late, great James Horner’s (who couldn’t do the film due to his unfortunate death in 2015) shoes, Rupert Gregson-Williams surprisingly turns in one of the strongest musical scores of the year. The mostly-Australian cast is excellent, with Andrew Garfield giving a career-best performance as Doss (at this point, I forgive him for “The Amazing Spiderman 2”), as well as strong supporting turns from Vince Vaughn as the funny/tough drill sergeant, and especially from Hugo Weaving as Doss’s PTSD-ridden WWI veteran father. Weaving genuinely looks like a man who died in the trenches in France but whose body still returned home, turning to booze and anger to make him forget the trauma he experienced.

I would say that Hacksaw Ridge has all the makings of a great film but is slightly held back by some story choices. The film kind of ends shortly after Doss’s heroic exploits with some standard biopic text and interviews from his real-life former comrades. It’s fine, but I think it would have had more impact to first show Doss returning home and reuniting with his wife and family, considering how prominent the theme of family was in the film. Also, there is one scene late in the movie involving Japanese officers, which I won’t spoil, but it feels forced and EXTREMELY unnecessary (I guess Gibson just has a thing for beheadings).

Still, considering how good this film is overall and how well it’s being received, I’m happy to report that Mel Gibson is no longer persona non-grata in Hollywood, and that I absolutely look forward to whatever he’s making next. Welcome back, Mel. We missed you.

Note: Something I thought of after watching “Hacksaw Ridge”; Mel Gibson could totally direct a “Mad Max” film.

5. Hell or High Water - On an early Texas morning, a two men rob a pair of branches of the Texas Midlands Bank. While not without a few hiccups, the robberies go smoothly. The two men are siblings; calm and smart divorced father Toby (Chris Pine), and his loose-cannon ex-con brother Tanner (Ben Foster). They are trying to raise enough money to save their family farm by paying off the foreclosing bank with its own stolen money, while being hunted down by Texas Rangers Marcus and Alberto (Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham), the former close to retirement. There are still a number of branches they need to rob in order to raise the needed amount. What ensues is one of the most mature and intelligent thrillers I’ve seen in a long time.

There is no black or white. Just two sides of the law. We understand both sides, and the motivation of each man. While the robbery scenes are thrilling and gritty, the movie actually shows a tremendous level of restraint. The pacing is deliberately slow, but the film is so well-made and well-written and so confident in itself that it never becomes boring, and it builds exceptionally well to its grip-you-by-the-balls climax. The movie spends a lot of time with the characters talking, with dialogue that feels both realistic and entertaining. The extremely underrated TV show "Justified" has instilled in me a joy in hearing Southern people talk shit to each other, and the movie doesn't let me down in that regard. The rural, neo-Western setting is wonderfully atmospheric and does a good job conveying how tough life can be in such a place (with a noteworthy supporting performance from Katy Mixon as a waitress who refuses to give back a large tip of stolen money to the Rangers).

Even though his character is pretty much a less alcoholic and more down-to-earth version of his Rooster Cogburn from the Coens’ “True Grit”, Bridges still impresses with a soulful and highly entertaining performance. Similarly, while Ben Foster feels a bit typecast as the “wild man” brother, he still knocks it out of the park with his confidence and screen presence. The biggest surprise is Chris Pine, tuning down his smirky charm and turning in his best performance to date as a man whose cool-headedness masks his desperation.

If I had to think of a flaw, it's that the film has a slightly-annoying over-reliance on licensed country songs in the first half of the movie...really, that's all I can think of. The slow pacing might be a turnoff for some people (some extremely thick people who very likely have ADHD and are virgins), but it pays off so well that I can't even consider it a problem for anyone with a three-digit IQ. If you are tired of action movies or thrillers being dumb, this is the movie for you. If you are tired of smart movies being dull, this is the movie for you. "Hell or High Water" is a diamond in the rough that is 2016, and deserves your attention.

4. Elle – I saw this movie solely because Paul Verhoeven directed a sizable portion of my childhood (Robocop, Total Recall, and Starship Troopers), and he has enough goodwill based on that alone that I’ll check out anything he makes. While his European films are noticeably different from his American action classics, one thing that hasn’t faltered is his skill as a director and unique voice in telling provocative stories. “Elle” certainly has one hell of an opening. A wealthy middle-aged woman named Michèle is attacked and raped in her home in France. After the intruder leaves, Michèle calmly collects herself, cleans herself and her home, and goes to work the next day as if nothing is wrong. The rest of the movie is about her conducting her own investigation into finding out who attacked her as we learn about her feelings and why she doesn’t notify the police, as well as her complicated relationships with her friends, neighbors and family.

I can definitely see a lot of people getting offended by this movie’s depiction of rape and its consequences on the main character, but considering how complex and unpredictable human beings can be, this is one of the most bracing, raw and honest depictions of the subject I’ve ever seen. Put it simply, this isn’t your typical rape-revenge film. The excellent writing and Verhoeven’s strong command of the material and his cast elevates it beyond what I thought possible. The characters are very well-defined, with all their own quirks and needs and insecurities, and despite how uncomfortable the film can be, it’s also surprisingly very funny in how it presents them and their relationships with each other, especially during a fantastic Christmas dinner scene where all the characters and their animosities come together. There is a lot of gossiping, resentment, passive-aggressiveness and cuckoldry on display (it’s a French movie, so no surprise there). The film is certainly lurid, but everything from the story and performances to the themes and subtext is done so well that you can’t stop watching. At no moment during its two-and-a-half-hour running time was I bored.

“Elle” is a film I wouldn’t recommend to everyone due to its’ length and subject matter, but thanks to the strong writing, Paul Verhoeven’s confident direction, and a stunning lead performance from Isabelle Huppert, this a bold, gripping, and surprisingly entertaining film that is absolutely worth going out of your way to see if you can stomach it. Plus, there’s a really cute cat.

With that out of the way; please come back to America and make another gory, over-the-top action film, Mr. Verhoeven. Hollywood needs you more than you need it.

3. Sing Street – An Irish lad from a broken home in 1985 Dublin gets transferred to a rough, inner-city school. Soon he meets a mysterious girl hanging around outside the school, and in an effort to impress her, asks her to be a model in a music video for his non-existent band.

What follows is a coming-of-age story about artistic expression and love where the boy gathers anyone that can play an instrument (including the funniest part of the movie where they try to recruit “probably the only black guy in Dublin”), starts making music and videos, and slowly starts bonding with the girl. It’s tough to make a movie set in 20th century Ireland feel optimistic, but writer/director John Carney deftly maneuvers between comedy and drama, makes the film simultaneously fantastic yet grounded, making the story of falling in love and following one’s dreams feel believable and easy to root for.

From the tagline “Boy meets girl. Girl unimpressed. Boy starts band”, you can probably guess the general progression of the plot. This, coupled with the fact that I don’t like coming-of-age stories, or musicals, or Irish people*, means that this film was facing an uphill battle from me. Imagine how goddamn good this film must be that it’s number 3 on my list this year. A cynic would say that it doesn’t face much competition from an unremarkable year for film like 2016, but “Sing Street” is a wonderful ode to the power of music and young love that would be great in any year, and I defy you to watch it without a smile on your face. Basically, if you possess a heart, a soul, a dream, a love for music, or a pulse, I cannot recommend “Sing Street” enough.

*kidding. I love you, you pale, swear-y, chip-shop bombing drunkards.

2. Star Trek Beyond – After a strong start to a reboot of the storied franchise with 2009’s “Star Trek”, the series took a nosedive with “Star Trek Into Darkness”, the woefully misguided attempt to make the series dark and gritty. Because of this and the new director being Justin Lin, a man who has made four (well, three and a cameo) films about Vin Diesel sleepily growling about family in between scenes of supercars performing Cirque du Soleil acts, I wasn’t all too excited for the new entry, even though it’d be written by talented comic actor and well-known nerd Simon Pegg. Who would have thought that Pegg and Lin would have been the ones that saved not only 2016 from being a shit year for blockbusters, but also the soul of the “Star Trek” franchise?

The plot is about Kirk and the Enterprise crew getting stranded on a remote world after being attacked by a mysterious warlord while investigating a missing ship. It’s a slick and self-contained adventure, making it feel like a long and big-budget episode of the series in the best possible way. I don’t want to imply that this is the “Star Trek” of yore. It’s still a big, over-the-top space action film. But it has something that the previous two films (especially Into Darkness) lacked; spirit. The spirit of discovery, of exploration, of optimism. That despite the dangers in the galaxy, any problem can be overcome as long as all the species work together. Most importantly, it has an emphasis on character, actually slowing down at times to let them breathe and talk and joke with each other (y’know, like they’re people or something, and not just plot-devices). There’s a wonderful little scene at the start where Kirk and Bones share a drink to toast Kirk’s deceased father, and the tributes to the gone-but-not-forgotten Leonard Nimoy and Anton Yelchin were beautifully done.

It’s remarkable how well Lin and Pegg capture this “Star Trek” spirit while still making an exciting, blockbuster action film. Lin brings his A-game to the action scenes, making them fun, creative, and natural as a story progression. You always understand why the action is happening, as opposed to a random fight being thrown in for its own sake. There’s a certain scene later in the film where a ship has to take on a swarm of smaller enemies with a familiar musical cue, and I cannot remember the last time I ever felt so much hype and childish glee in a movie scene.

I guess the villain is the same generic normal-guy-who-was-betrayed-and-wants revenge that the past two films had, but between the still-excellent cast (newcomer Sofia Boutella steals the show as an alien warrior/scavenger that Scotty meets), a strong soundtrack, awesome visuals, a fun story, involving action scenes, and that warm “Star Trek” feel to it, “Star Trek Beyond” feels like a jolt to the heart of a series that was in danger of becoming lost to soulless, studio-driven blockbuster territory. Assuming there’s more to this series of films, I cannot wait to see where the franchise boldly goes from here.

1. Free Fire – This is the most fun I’ve had in a theater since “Mad Max: Fury Road”. I wasn’t a huge fan of Ben Wheatley’s previous films, but among the material I didn’t really care for, I saw an undeniable talent in his work. Here, it’s like he used his powers to make a movie precisely for me.

The film is about an arms deal that takes place in a warehouse between two groups of criminals that quickly gets out of hand after shots are fired in the exchange. The remaining 70 minutes of this 90-minute long movie is basically one really long shootout as everyone picks sides, betray each other, and get increasingly wounded while rarely ceasing their shit-talking. Think “Reservoir Dogs” as a comedy of miscommunication. In an amazing feat of filmmaking, Wheatley makes sure that this lengthy shootout set mostly in one large room isn’t boring for a second. His smart, gradual escalation of events punctuated with a number of “holy shit” moments and set pieces, held together by excellent editing, keeps the film exciting and darkly funny throughout. In between the big moments, characters take pause to hurl expletives at each other and ponder their own situation as they desperately try to get out of it, adding up to people you care about and are interested in even if they’re all dicks. This is a brilliant example of how important pacing and characterization is to a film, especially to one with so little plot.

Also helping is the hilarious banter, delivered by a wonderful and colorful cast of characters played by a small but absolutely stellar cast. Everyone is great and play their characters perfectly, with a standout performance by Sharlto Copley as an unhinged, self-absorbed arms dealer who causes much of the conflict in the film. I knew I’d love him as soon as a character says “Vernon was misdiagnosed as a child genius and never got over it.” I also want to mention the sound design, which is some of the best in recent memory, with every bullet fired feeling like a loud jolt to one’s system. The writing is highly enjoyable on a superficial level, and even carries a bit of depth with the shootout being a clever allegory for human nature and just generally what happens when idiots own guns.

“Free Fire” is by far the best movie I saw this year, and when it gets a theatrical release, I implore you to go see it. The only complaints I can think of are that the ending is just alright, and after a certain point you start to wonder where some of the characters keep getting their ammo from. Time will tell if this film stands up to repeated viewings, but this was easily the funniest, craziest, and most entertaining film I’ve seen all year. Yes, my favorite movie of 2016 is a 2017 movie in which characters argue and shoot each other in a dirty warehouse for 90 minutes. Cinema isn’t dead yet.

The “30 and Still Living in Parents’ Basement” Award for Biggest Disappointment 

Nominees:

 ·         Jack Reacher: Never Go Back

·         Jason Bourne

·         Passengers

·         Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

·         Warcraft

Runner-up:

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Winner:

Passengers

The “Clever Marketing” Award for Best Tagline

Nominees:

·         Elvis & Nixon – “On December 21st, 1970, two of America's greatest recording artists met for the first time.”

·         Free Fire – “All guns. No control.”

·         London Has Fallen – “Prepare for bloody hell”

·         The Dressmaker – “Revenge is back in fashion”

Runner-up:

The Dressmaker

Winner:

Elvis & Nixon

The “Postcore Avantwave” Award for Best Film Score

Nominees:

·         Bear McCreary – 10 Cloverfield Lane

·         Justin Hurwitz – La La Land

·         Mark Mancina, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Opetaia Foa'i - Moana

·         Matthew Margeson – Eddie the Eagle

·         Michael Giacchino – Star Trek Beyond

·         Rupert Gregson-Williams – Hacksaw Ridge

·         Shirō Sagisu – Shin Godzilla

Runner-up:

Mark Mancina, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Opetaia Foa'i - Moana

Winner:

Bear McCreary – 10 Cloverfield Lane

The "I'm Glad We Decided to Keep It" Award for Best Child Performance

Nominees:

·         Angourie Rice - The Nice Guys

·         Auli'i Cravalho - Moana

·         Ferdia Walsh-Peelo – Sing Street

·         Harvey Scrimshaw - The Witch

·         Julian Dennison - Hunt for the Wilderpeople

·         Kim Su-an – Train to Busan

·         Lucas Jade Zumann – 20th Century Women

Runner-up:

Julian Dennison - Hunt for the Wilderpeople

Winner:

Angourie Rice - The Nice Guys

The “If Only the Rest of the Movie Was This Good” Award for Best Scene

Nominees:

·         Athens riot – Jason Bourne

·         Beach drowning – Silence

·         Captain America and Winter Soldier vs. Iron Man – Captain America: Civil War

·         Car chase – Operation Avalanche

·         Christmas dinner party – Elle

·         Climactic robbery/shootout/getaway – Hell or High Water

·         Desmond’s rescues – Hacksaw Ridge

·         “Drive It Like You Stole It” – Sing Street

·         Epilogue – La La Land

·         Entering the ship – Arrival

·         “How Far I’ll Go” – Moana

·         Police station – Manchester by the Sea

·         Sabotage – Star Trek Beyond

·         The un-destruction of Hong Kong – Doctor Strange

·         The 90-meter jump – Eddie the Eagle

·         Quicksilver and the exploding mansion – X-Men: Apocalypse

·         Warehouse rescue - Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

Runner-up:

Police station – Manchester by the Sea

Winner:

Sabotage – Star Trek Beyond

The “Pig in Lipstick” Award for Prettiest Movie

Nominees:

·         A Bigger Splash

·         Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

·         Doctor Strange

·         Hail Caesar!

·         Kubo and the Two Strings

·         La La Land

·         Moana

·         The Handmaiden

·         The Love Witch

Runner-up:

The Handmaiden

Winner:

Kubo and the Two Strings

The “Premium Meth” Award for Best Chemistry

Nominees:

·         Adam Driver and Golshifteh Farahani - Paterson

·         Casey Affleck and Michelle Williams – Manchester by the Sea

·         Chris Pine and Ben Foster – Hell or High Water

·         Gerard Butler and his knife – London Has Fallen

·         Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham – Hell or High Water

·         Michael Peña and Alexander Skarsgård – War on Everyone

·         Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton – Loving

·         Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe – The Nice Guys

·         Ryan Reynolds and Morena Baccarin – Deadpool

·         Sacha Baron Cohen and Mark Strong – The Brothers Grimsby

Runner-up:

Michael Peña and Alexander Skarsgård – War on Everyone

Winner:

Casey Affleck and Michelle Williams – Manchester by the Sea

The “Healed Broken Bone” Award for Best Cast

Nominees:

·         20th Century Women

·         Captain America: Civil War

·         Everybody Wants Some!!

·         Fences

·         Free Fire

·         Hail, Caesar!

·         Love & Friendship

·         Sing Street

·         Star Trek Beyond

·         The Magnificent Seven

Runner-up:

Sing Street

Winner:

Free Fire

The “Convincingly Faked Orgasm” Award for Best Performance

Honorable Mentions:

·         Andrew Garfield – Hacksaw Ridge

·         Ben Foster – Hell or High Water

·         Blake Lively – The Shallows

·         Chris Pine – Hell or High Water

·         Emma Stone – La La Land

·         Hugo Weaving – Hacksaw Ridge

·         Joe Alwyn – Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk

·         Joel Edgerton – Loving

·         Judy Davis – The Dressmaker

·         Kate Beckinsale – Love & Friendship

·         Kate Winslet – The Dressmaker

·         Kwak Do-won – The Wailing

·         Mahershala Ali - Moonlight

·         Ruth Negga – Loving

·         Sam Neill – Hunt for the Wilderpeople

·         Viggo Mortensen – Captain Fantastic

·         Woody Harrelson – The Edge of Seventeen

Nominees:

·         Adam Driver – Paterson

·         Alden Ehrenreich – Hail, Caesar!

·         Annette Bening – 20th Century Women

·         Casey Affleck – Manchester by the Sea

·         Denzel Washington – Fences

·         Gerard Butler – London Has Fallen

·         Greta Gerwig – 20th Century Women

·         Isabelle Huppert - Elle

·         Jeff Bridges – Hell or High Water

·         John Goodman – 10 Cloverfield Lane

·         Michael Shannon – Nocturnal Animals

·         Michelle Williams – Manchester by the Sea

·         Ralph Fiennes – A Bigger Splash

·         Rebecca Hall – Christine

·         Ryan Gosling – The Nice Guys

·         Ryan Reynolds – Deadpool

·         ­Sharlto Copley – Free Fire

·         Tom Bennett – Love & Friendship

·         Viola Davis – Fences

Runner-up:

Gerard Butler – London Has Fallen

Winner:

Ryan Gosling – The Nice Guys

In regards to my final award:

The whole “Fuck 2016” thing has been done to death, albeit not undeservingly, so this’ll be my only word on the matter. A lot of us had a rough year, dealing with political strife, global conflict, environmental issues, personal problems, celebrity deaths, “Suicide Squad”, etc. Even in film, 2016 has felt like a bit of a downer, with many films I was looking forward to letting me down. However, there have been quite a few gems, especially in the latter half of the year, and a good number of these are off the beaten path, ones I actively searched for to find and ones I gave a shot even if they’re the type of thing I wouldn’t normally see.

My point is, we have to make an effort to get the good out of life. You can still find some gems while wading through a river of shit (which you’re going to wade through anyway), and I’m not just talking about movies. Try something you normally wouldn’t. Try to pick up a new hobby. Make some personal time for yourself, even if you’re swamped with work or school. Start exercising if you don’t already (hell, try yoga). Don’t just accept that life is shit; do something to make it less shit. Always strive to better yourself, because while there’s no such thing as perfection (unless you’re Michael Shannon), it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t reach for it.

The mere fact that you’re reading this means that you’re actively trying to de-pleb yourself, or maybe it’s because you love me or maybe I just make you laugh sometimes. In any case, thank you for reading this year-in-review. As it has been for the past two years, writing this was fun and therapeutic. I wish you all luck in seeking happiness (and good taste in film, like mine), and for those of you who have a bad day somewhere on that journey, film is always there for you, including the following films which can cheer one up even on the rainiest days.

The “Ancient Indian Burial Ground” Award for Film Most Likely to Raise Your Spirits

Nominees:

Eddie the Eagle

Sing Street

Hunt for the Wilderpeople

Everybody Wants Some!!

Moana

Runner-up:

Sing Street

Winner:

Eddie the Eagle

[chicagoindiecritics]

New from Kevin Wozniak on Kevflix: The Top 25 Movies of the 2010s

We’re finally here.  The 2010s are officially over (and have been for almost two weeks now) and what a decade it was.  When the decade began, I was in my final semester of film school at DePaul University in Chicago.  Now, ten years later, I run my own website as a movie critic.  Did I see myself in this position when the decade started?  Absolutely not.  I still can’t believe this is something I get to do and something I will continue to do for the unforeseeable future.

When it came to making this list and what movies made the list, I looked at a number of factors.  I looked at the movies I’ve revisited the most over the years.  I looked at the movies that had the biggest emotional impact on me.  I looked at the movies that I felt were important to cinema and movies that were important to me.  I looked at movies that made me go, “wow”, and movies that I simply love.  Like all of the “Best of the Decade” lists, this was incredibly hard to make and this is a list that if you asked me rank these movies again in a month, it would probably change.  But for now, here are my picks for the best movies of 2010s.

        25. AVENGERS: ENDGAME (Anthony and Joe Russo, 2019)

After eleven years and over twenty movies, the Russo Brothers gave us a fitting conclusion that is as big and epic as movies get.

    24. WARRIOR (Gavin O’Connor, 2011)

A deeply emotional spots drama about family and forgiveness coupled with realistic, crushing MMA scenes.

    23. TOY STORY 3 (Lee Unkrich)

Even with a fourth installment, Toy Story 3 still manages to be a sweet and touching end to Andy’s journey with Woody, Buzz, and the gang.

    22. POPSTAR: NEVER STOP NEVER STOPPING (Akiva Schaffer & Jorma Taccone, 2016)

The funniest movie of the decade also features base-shattering, smartly written rap songs.

    21. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – FALLOUT (Christopher McQuarrie, 2018)

The best action movie of the decade and the peak of Tom Cruise’s insanity.

    20. BLACK SWAN (Darren Aronofsky, 2010)

Darren Aronofsky’s psychological horror film features career-best work from Natalie Portman.

    19. INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2013)

Another Coen classic, this time about a struggling folk singer who just can’t catch a break.

    18. THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL (Wes Anderson, 2014)

Wes Anderson’s masterpiece is one of the most gorgeous movies of the decade.

    17. A STAR IS BORN (Bradley Cooper, 2018)

Bradley Cooper was a one man wrecking crew as he produced, co-wrote, starred, and directed this remake of a Hollywood classic that he made his own.

    16. MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (George Miller, 2015)

An insane, non-stop thrill ride from the great visionary George Miller.

    15. SPOTLIGHT (Tom McCarthy, 2015)

A riveting, disturbing procedural.

    14. LA LA LAND (Damien Chazelle, 2016)

Chazelle won a well-deserved Oscar for his lovely L.A. musical.

    13. SPRING BREAKERS (Harmony Korine, 2013)

Harmony Korine’s spring break nightmare featuring a legendary performance by James Franco.

    12. THE IRISHMAN (Martin Scorsese, 2019)

Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour crime epic is a somber look at loyalty and regret as we get old.

    11. INCEPTION (Christopher Nolan, 2010)

A mind-blowing crime thriller with the best final shot of the decade.

    And now, the top ten movies of the 2010s.

      10. THE AVENGERS (Joss Whedon, 2012)

The 2010s will forever be remembered for the Marvel Cinematic Universe and though Endgame ended it with a bang, it was 2012’s The Avengers that made this universe what it ended up being.  Five movies came together into one in a seamless fashion thanks to writer/director Joss Whedon, who effortlessly blends humor and action within the stellar cast.  The Avengers changed the game forever.

  9. HEREDITARY (Ari Aster, 2018)

No movie this decade haunted me more than Ari Aster’s debut, Hereditary.  The best horror film of the decade is more than just scares and is really a look at a grief-stricken family drama about dealing with a horrific tragedy.  Toni Collette is masterful as the mother of the family who slowly begins to crumble as she dives further into the life of her recently deceased mother, giving one of the best performances of her career and the decade.  Aster made a movie that will crush your heart and scare the hell out of you.

  8. LINCOLN (Steven Spielberg, 2012)

The 2010s were a great decade for Steve Spielberg.  This was a decade where Spielberg focused a lot on political stories, making a series of films I like to call his Amendment Trilogy.  This trilogy kicked off with 2012’s Lincoln and what a way to start it off.  This is stately look at Abraham Lincoln trying to emancipate slaves and end the Civil War is a gorgeous and captivating film.  Led by an Oscar-winning performance by Daniel Day-Lewis, who embodies the sixteenth president in a way no one else could, Lincoln is stunning work for Spielberg and ushered in a new stage in his career.

  7. GET OUT (Jordan Peele, 2017)

The best original screenplay of the decade belongs to Jordan Peele’s Get Out.  This darkly funny horror satire about black life in white America is a startling eye opener, as Peele looks at a black man (Daniel Kaluuya, giving an acting class in nuance) spends the weekend at his white girlfriend’s house until things go awry.  There are scenes that will have you laughing and scenes that will shock you and Peele balances the tones like a true pro.  This is the best debut film of the decade and film that only gets better the more I watch it.

  6. THE WOLF OF WALL STREET (Martin Scorsese, 2013)

The Wolf of Wall Street is balls-to-the-walls chaos.  A film of non-stop drugs, sex, money, and debauchery, and it all came from a 72-year-old Martin Scorsese.  Leonardo DiCaprio gives a career-best performance as Jordan Belfort, a stock-broker who rose to the top of the game, only to lose everything in a heap of drugs and crime.  Much like another Scorsese masterpiece, Goodfellas, Scorsese paints a portrait of the worst kind of people.  Mean people who are only in love with money, greed, and doing whatever the hell they want.  Yet we love every single one of them and want to join Belfort’s firm.  Scorsese had one hell of a decade, but The Wolf of Wall Street was his best.

  5. CREED (Ryan Coogler, 2015)

How do you reinvent a historic franchise?  That’s what Ryan Coogler did with Creed, a continuation of the Rocky franchise that also launched a new film series and made Michael B. Jordan a star.  What Coogler does best with Creed is find heart of the story and the heart of the Rocky franchise.  This has always been a franchise about friendship, family, never giving up, and finding yourself and that’s what he made here, as we watch Adonis Creed (Jordan) try to make a name for himself in the shadow of his father and Rocky (Sylvester Stallone, who hasn’t been this good since the original Rocky).  Coogler added a great visual style, a killer soundtrack, and tons of emotion to make Creed endlessly rewatchable and the biggest surprise of the decade.

  4. MONEYBALL (Bennett Miller, 2011)

Brad Pitt gives the best performance of his illustrious career in Bennett Miller’s Moneyball.  He plays Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane, a man who builds his team around the idea of buying runs not players, something completely different from every other baseball team.  But more than that, Moneyball is a movie about man who loves baseball with all his heart, yet anytime he gets close to a field, things go wrong for him.  This is a movie about taking chances and accepting your failures.  This is one of the best baseball movies ever made and there is barely any baseball action.  This is all about what happens inside the dugout and what goes on in the back office and thanks for stellar directing and a smart screenplay, it’s more exciting than any baseball action would be.

  3. DUNKIRK (Christopher Nolan, 2017)

If there was a director who owned the 2010s, that man was probably Christopher Nolan, who kept pushing the boundaries of cinema with every movie he made, whether it was how it was written or the scale of the film.  In under two hours, Nolan showed us how masterful he is at understanding space and scale while also making a film that transcends convention to make Dunkirk, one of the greatest war movies ever made.  This is a relentless movie about a group of soldiers trying to survive the attacks at Dunkirk during World War II.  Nolan does this by showing us happenings on land, the sea, and the air, all being shown in different time frames, while never showing us the enemy once.  My heart was racing the entire film and I was in complete awe of Nolan’s technical brilliance here, while also making us care for these soldiers and their survival.  Dunkirk is Nolan’s crowning achievement as a director.

  2. WHIPLASH (Damien Chazelle, 2014)

I remember the first time I saw Whiplash.  It was an early morning screening on the second day of the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.  From the opening shot of Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller, in a breakout performance) practicing on his drum-kit to the epic, earth-shattering finale, I knew Whiplash was a truly special movie.  Damien Chazelle’s sophomore effort is a war film is a music room.  A blistering, brutal look at what it takes to be perfect and asking the question of how far is too far?  JK Simmons gives the best supporting actor performance of the decade as Fletcher, the tyrant music teacher to Andrew who pushes him to his limit.  In an era of participation trophies and effort medals, Whiplash comes along and tells you to shove it.  To be the best, you myst be willing to push yourself to beyond what you can think.  You must give every ounce of blood, sweat, and tears to get what you want and failure is not an option.  This is a movie that will kick your ass and have your heart racing and palms sweating from minute one.  Chazelle made an exhilarating masterpiece on his second try.

  1. THE SOCIAL NETWORK (David Fincher, 2010)

The Social Network is not only the best movie of the decade, but it is the most important one as well.  David Fincher’s account of the invention of Facebook and the controversy that followed is a movie that has not only held up, but improved over the years, as our dependency on technology has increased throughout the decade  This is a movie that captures everything about today’s society. Aaron Sorkin’s rapid-fire, impeccable screenplay about one man’s rise to the top by losing everything around him, including his closest friends, is an all-timer. Sorkin’s words are a spark off the page and are more exciting than most action movies.  Fincher’s work behind the camera has never been better. This is the best work of Fincher’s career.  A culmination of everything he has done in his career, both visually and narratively, giving us striking images while utilizing the quick editing and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ score (the best of the decade) perfectly in the film.  The cast, led by Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Armie Hammer, and Justin Timberlake, is perfect, giving life to Sorkin’s words in their own creative, genius way. There is no film that represents our current time in history like The Social Network. It is a film that years from now, even decades, people will look back and see what America was at this time.  It is the best film of the decade.

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THE ESSAYIST IS MANY THINGS: egotistic is definitely one of them. This cuts both ways, however. Essays can be focused on the writerly self, but they can also offer an escape. As Montaigne said well over 400 years ago, one gets rather wrapped up in oneself. “I have no more made my book than my book has made me — a book consubstantial with its author, concerned with my own self, an integral part of my life.” Yet the essayist also retreats. Emerson saw his reflections as solitude, where “all mean egotism vanishes” and he becomes “a transparent eyeball,” a “nothing.” The essay is much more than that too, of course. A riff or a sally, a fight or a laugh. A journey, a ramble, a wandering about. Beyond such meanderings — the digressions on which the essay thrives — the nature of the form is itself formless. It might be “short or long,” as Woolf wrote in 1922, “serious or trifling, about God and Spinoza,” or — recalling Samuel Butler — “about turtles and Cheapside.” But so often, as she wrote on Montaigne, the essay turns back to oneself, “the greatest monster and miracle in the world.”

Fast-forward almost a century and we have Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant by Joel Golby, which takes up (and takes down) his own monstrous ego with delicious panache. You probably know of his work. He’s a crusading hero for twenty- and thirtysomething UK renters who frequently lambastes the hellish property market in his regular “London Rental Opportunity of the Week” column for Vice. From an exposé of a toilet jammed inside a shower at the foot of the bed, to a Beckettian litany going over and over the nature of a bedsit with multiple sinks but no adequate space for a mattress, Golby wages a single-handed war against that peculiar subspecies of human: the landlord. He’s massively popular, not least with those of us destined to forever move from one overpriced grief hole to the next. Golby does absurdist humor on other themes, too. A piece asking questions about why Pete Doherty was seen “aggressively eating” a massive breakfast outside a greasy spoon in Margate; 101 ways to ruin a party; “deep dives” into property TV shows; the likelihood of certain celebrities eating worms if they go on I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! One recent column on “The New Rules of Being a Millennial” is both caustic and community-building. If Lena Dunham (as a “voice of her generation” — that now somewhat hackneyed joke in Girls) was a member of the precariat and grew up in Chesterfield, she might turn phrases like this:

The problem with the “us” thing is that we (Us) do not have a collective term for ourselves which isn’t wildly inaccurate or painfully cringey. “Hipster” suggests a level of effort that I think we’re all big enough to admit we don’t subscribe to. Does “millennials” work? Sort of, but not. It’s too broad. Plus, “millennial” is more-or-less a slur these days, isn’t it. Nobody self-identifies as one. It’s just something your dad calls people with university debt. It’s nothing. The people I’m talking about are the ones who know what De School is and don’t really know what a “James Arthur” is.

Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant is a gathering of 21 new essays and three updated pieces, and arrives at a time when emerging writers are voicing their histories and outlooks in hilarious and poignant ways that befit modern anxieties. The Chicago-based blogger-turned-writer Samantha Irby’s debut collection, Meaty, and her second, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, both offer takes on bad sex, Crohn’s disease, life as a woman in her mid-30s, loss, and more, and recent collections from Hanif Abdurraqib, Chelsea Hodson, Scaachi Koul, and others reflect an exciting boom in the genre in the last few years alone. The essay has made a comeback, but it was always powerful. Again, Woolf said it best. “You can say in this shape what you cannot with equal fitness say in any other,” she wrote in “The Decay of Essay-Writing” in 1905: “its proper use is to express one’s personal peculiarities.”

There’s definitely something about essays, in their long-held comic tradition — “the joke” of literature, as G. K. Chesterton framed them — that resonates strongly today. After all, they are easily digestible, and in turn digest ideas. They are often simply “brain soufflés,” as David Lazar puts it in After Montaigne: a “walk-in closet of self or selves” ever more popular in our era of selfies and accumulations of followers on social media. Indeed, contemporary essays are often thoughts that gestate online, developed from blogs or one-off pieces: the sort of text with “14-minute read” under a byline for the crushing commute to work. They can also be surprisingly long and detailed, putting pay to the redundant idea that millennials cannot focus on anything beyond a shakshuka brunch, or — as the Daily Mail might interminably trot out — avocado toast. Caity Weaver’s epic quest to eat limitless mozzarella sticks as part of a TGI Friday’s promotion requires a good chunk of your time. John Saward’s classic reflections on Mike Tyson are as astute and amusing as Hazlitt. But with Golby we’re treated to two things at once: the pleasure of his wit and style as he ranges his themes, and a sustained, near-Swiftian satire on the very real and material challenges driven by the United Kingdom’s housing crisis. It’s not as simple as just laughing at £1,894 for a fold-out bed in Marylebone, or hedonism gone wrong; in Brilliant, we find a writer gunning for a fight.

In “PCM” (“Per Calendar Month”), Golby lays out the vagaries of dealing with the feudal overlords that might kick you out or take your deposit at the drop of a hat:

The landlords were very keen to stress when I was viewing the house that they were Reasonable People, which I have learned to now take from landlords as an immediate red flag that actually means “I am insanely deranged,” but I didn’t know this then; I was but a young bear cub, tiny and clear-eyed and full of trust, and plus desperate.

Golby intersperses his stories of the worst offenders with brutal, bloody fantasies of decimating each and every one: “The sound a landlord makes when you nail their toes down into the wood floor beneath them is, ‘This isn’t the definition of normal wear and tear.’” This is followed by an adroit move to his notion of “capsule coziness”: the kind of Scandinavian homely warmth called hygge that people were raving about a few years ago that in actuality equates to a herbal tea, a candle, and a “heather-colored blanket” you have to pack and move with every time the tenancy is up. Yet for all his inherently socialist leanings — this piece includes a well-researched outline of the real estate sector going back to 1986 — Golby is the first to admit that he is a slave to late capitalism’s charms. “Monopoly is the best game because the Actual Devil lives inside it,” he writes in another piece, before confessing to his rapacious greed and inhuman dealings on the board. “When I play Monopoly,” he writes,

I am David Cameron rimming Maggie off, I am Edwina Currie fucking John Major harder than he can fuck her back, I am a roaring-drunk Boris Johnson, I am Tory to the core-y, I am shaking hands with property developers in shady backroom multimillion-pound deals, I am blocking social housing to build luxury apartments in an effort to squeeze an extra £200K into my own private account, I am wearing a panama hat in the Cayman Islands and laughingly lighting a cigar with a £50 note.

In the United Kingdom there is a generational moniker: “Thatcher’s children.” If you were born in the ’80s, so the tag implies, you’ve been raised on rampant conservatism — the assumedly money-grabbing offspring spawned by her regime. But in truth we’re more conflicted. Society has raised us to believe getting on the property ladder is of paramount importance, but the reality of life-long renting and being pushed out of the city draws a big line between those who gained and those who lost under and after Thatcher. That Golby spins comedy gold from such a sorry state of affairs is testimony to how much we need a voice like his. Given his toothsome fight against oppressive property-owning profiteers, it is tempting to ascribe a cohesive political drive to Brilliant’s author. I asked him over email if he was interested in the horrors of capitalism, given how much of a theme it is in his work. “Mm, yes and no,” he responds. “My politics are, like baby-level deep. I was on a podcast the other week and everyone kept saying ‘neoliberal’ in a natural, casual air that made me sweat. I know the right and the left and vaguely where I fall on that spectrum … but beyond that I don’t feel qualified to talk. I don’t have the vocabulary.”

A similar modesty emerges with the very title of the book, even in its absurd egotism. “The title was initially there to make me laugh,” Golby explains, “then over time it became supremely annoying. It’s hard to pronounce without counting the Brilliants on your fingers: naming the book in this way has become the ultimate self-own.” One also finds this “ultimate self-own” in Golby’s approach to the book’s other major theme: masculinity. He riffs on the ineffable quality of “Machismo” (Golby’s brand is “soft knits and high necks” and a complex skin-care regime that includes the joys of an eye mask), offers an exhaustive, obsessive overview of all the Rocky films ranked in order of greatness, and marvels at Lenny Kravitz’s ability to pull off a leather jacket. (Golby decidedly cannot.) This deconstruction of masculinity accounts for some of the book’s funniest moments:

I realized a way of upgrading myself from a 5-out-of-10 to a solid 6 is to get a special trimmer to do the edging on my beard. And suddenly I went from a bar-of-soap-in-the-shower man to a guy with flannels, with precise and expensive tweezers. A guy who says this: “£55 for a moisturizer? Hell fucking yes!”

I asked Golby why masculinity can be so funny. “Well, because it’s absurd,” he replies, “but also it’s been one of the overriding influences on culture for the past million years, and we’re only just — just! — cracking out from that shadow … A lot of the things every man who has ever lived or ever died, a lot of what he has ever done, has been due to some deep roiling well of masculinity.”

I wonder if Golby is quite apart from the hegemonic masculinities (as initially theorized by R. W. Connell) that he decries. Brilliant arrives on the shoulders of gender theory: generations of feminist work with which emergent men’s studies became conversant in the 1980s, in works by Peter Schwenger, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Lynne Segal, and many others. A major subject of such studies was the “New Man” figure that appeared in popular culture in that decade — an emotionally more intelligent, respectful of women, post-yuppie incarnation — which in turn led to the “New Lad” of the 1990s. Integral to the British “lad culture” associated with the Britpop musical genre, the “New Lad” has been characterized by Rosalind Gill as an ironic, “beer and shagging,” Nuts- or Loaded-reading, cheeky manchild. We found him in David Baddiel and Frank Skinner’s comedy and the “Three Lions” football anthem, for instance, in the TV series Men Behaving Badly and in the fiction of Nick Hornby and Martin Amis. “Ladlit,” as Elaine Showalter named it, is a direct forerunner of Brilliant, which — over 20 years after the classic “lad” film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and in the light shined on shameful male behavior by the #MeToo movement — inherits and plays with its own genre heritage.

On the one hand, Golby retrenches old notions of manhood. “The Full Spectrum of Masculinity as Represented by Rocky in the Rocky Movies” tangent is a somewhat limited list that veers between brute force and fragility, relying on tired myths as the joke. There’s a familiarity in this move, a well-worn trope. After all, as Steve Connor wrote in 2001 (in “The Shame of Being a Man”), talk about being a man usually has “tucked into it a snicker at its bumptious presumption”: “[W]e find it hard to take masculinity as seriously as we suppose.” That Golby turns his comedy on this theme so frequently suggests a reiteration not wholly free of its antecedents. On the other hand, however, he’s doing something utterly new with the late 2010s permutation of “lads.”

Golby’s Instagram is often one long stream of captioned images sending up exhausted “haway the lads” lager-swilling clichés with a belligerent repetition of “love and appreciation to the lads” — men and women — until it goes from funny to irritating to funny again. He’s also aware of the ways in which, as Connor puts it, “to write is to be unmanned, meritoriously to unman oneself.” Golby embraces such “unmanning.” He explores his own sensitivity and offers a catalog of “All the Fights I’ve Lost.” He’s part of a new generation that knows (yet still laughs) at how, as Connor again writes, “[m]en are spent up: masculinity is a category of ruin, a crashed category. It’s a bust.” Golby is also aware of its persistent homosocial nature: the values and relations exchanged between men, as Sedgwick’s ground-breaking work revealed. “I have to have a very small-voice conversation with myself every time I put a selfie on Instagram,” he tells me. “‘Is this … lame? Will the other boys … mock me?’ It’s an insane and stupid thing to be under a thrall to.”

The homosocial dimension of Golby’s thoughts on masculinity might explain the book’s main oddity. Brilliant has no women in Golby’s love life to speak of. No formative crushes, sex, dating stories — nothing except an encounter with a man in Barcelona selling state-of-the-art sex dolls. The cringeworthy, non-erotic nature of these scenes made me wince with the uncanny feeling Ernst Jentsch and later Freud associated with E. T. A. Hoffmann’s automaton doll Olympia in The Sandman. They are, as Golby puts it, “eerie”: “balloon-like breasts w/ bullet nipples, sagging unlocked jaw w/ a raw pink tongue, splayed neat rubberized vagina, a one-size-fits-all butthole put out with a drill.” Again, we’re less in the realm of sexuality and more in gendered constructs. Golby offers a feminist take on AI and consent, yet feels disquietingly shorn of “the pulsing core of straight masculinity” when surrounded by these uncanny valley robots. He has it both ways: exceeding the “busted” category of manhood, yet circling back to it for a laugh. Is this a new new laddism? The book provokes such a question.

There’s an adolescent immaturity to Golby’s writing, to be sure, but a joyful one, with a comedic suaveness that demands attention. He consistently delivers the jokes through distinctive stylistic moves. Words and phrases pile up in heaps until bam! — the thing tips over and you’re laughing, rereading. He even manages to pull off some comedy in the opening essay, the moving yet funny “Things You Only Know If Both Your Parents Are Dead” that appeared in an earlier form on Vice and more recently the Guardian, about being orphaned at 25. He repeats “My parents are dead” no fewer than 22 times, yet still finds humor in grief, in um-ming and ahh-ing over which kind of beer basket to plump for for a neighbor, or buying vol-au-vents at Tesco. (There was more about the ubiquitous supermarket Tesco, but it was subbed by the US editor for being a bit too British. Other Britishisms include: the cheap pub chain Wetherspoons; the cigarette papers Rizla; tights.) This is perhaps one of the most powerful things about the book: people have reached out to Golby after that essay’s first publication, “as if I am some sort of griefsaver,” but, as he says to friends, “no two griefs are the same. They are always different spikey, awkward shapes. There’s no clean, easy way to vomit grief up out of your system. It just works its way through you in whatever way it chooses to.”

In some ways, as with his romantic life, Golby keeps a lot back, but aspects of Brilliant, like his loss, are totally up front — a juxtaposition that gets us back to the question of ego. I wonder if he considers himself private. “I don’t know if I’m wildly private,” he tells me. “I tend to tweet every thought I have, Instagram my dinner with a forced hashtag and wrote an essay [“Ribs”] about attempting auto fellatio — so let’s not worry too much about that.” Golby still harbors a strong, endearing desire to go to America and “hole up in a motel room with every snack I’ve ever seen on TV and watch 24-hour news.” (He’s wanted to do this since he was about eight.) He admits that his book is all about him, as he has had to convey what it’s about to many an editor’s bemusement with “a blank stare and say something along the lines of: ‘things that I like. I am the theme.’” Ultimately, he confesses, “more than anything else it is, still, fundamentally, just an ego trip thing. I have an enormous ego. An insufferable one.”

In the end, it is Golby’s satire that carries most weight. I ask him one final question, which was always on my lips as I read his columns and choice bits of the book. Is it possible for a human being to become a landlord without turning into a monster? “No,” he replies, firmly. “It’s not possible to become a landlord without turning into a monster. It’s not even possible to conceive of the idea of becoming a landlord without some hollow part of you already being monstrous. No landlord can escape the curse of their own landlordism. Their soul is condemned before they even pull up outside the auction house.”

¤

Cathryn Setz is an Associate Visiting Research Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Primordial Modernism: Animals, Ideas, transition (1927–1938) (Edinburgh University Press, 2019).

The post The Ultimate Self-Own: On Joel Golby’s “Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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[adambstingus]

Inside The Handmaiden: A Lesbian Erotic Thriller and the Sexiest Film of the Year

Acclaimed filmmaker Park Chan-wook (‘Oldboy’) opens up about his upcoming film over beers with Jen Yamato in Austin, Texas. “>

Halfway through his first trip to Texas, Korean auteur Park Chan-wook found himself on a tour of a picturesque religious compound notorious for the sex crimes of a cult-like spiritual leader. Five years ago, its once-venerated guru Prakashanand Saraswati fled the country, escaping a trial that saw him sentencedin absentiato over two centuries in prison. On a hot Texas afternoon in September, the director ofOldboystrolled the grounds with his Leica taking in the palatial white granite architecture.

Park was taken by the sights and the lurid true tale, soaking in the experience as he seems to all his travels. The director and avid photographer had come to Austin to screen his Cannes hitThe Handmaidenat Fantastic Fest following its Toronto premiere. Hed tasted Texas BBQ. Hed shopped for trinkets along South Congress Ave. When we met to discuss his period lesbian love-thriller over fine Texan beers this week, he was still marveling at the beauty and hidden perversity forever tied to the Barsana Dham.

It reminded me a little of Uncle Kouzuki inThe Handmaiden, he joked of one of the many deliciously complex characters in his new film, speaking through his traveling companion and translator, Wonjo Jeong. Im a photographer. I thought going to a place like this Id be able to capture some absurd images on my camera. The power that religion has over people, how it draws people in, is always amazing.

Park, arguably Koreas most famed and celebrated filmmaker, made his directorial debut in 1992 and scored his first huge hit in 2000 with the record-breakingJ.S.A.: Joint Security Area, a military thriller about a mysterious murder between soldiers from North and South Korea. In 2003 he released his intoxicatingly elegiac revenge thrillerOldboyand became forever synonymous with its brand of hyperviolent, perverse brutality.

But there are stratums to Parks films, even as they tend toward the extremes of genre, from the two other films that round out hisVengeance Trilogyto his vampire taleThirstto 2013sStoker, the gothic potboiler that marked his English-language Hollywood debut. Consider: When he describes to me the walrus carved from walrus tusk hed just bought at one of Austins eclectic thrift stores, the conversation winds its way to a documentary hed enjoyed, also on the subject of discovering extraordinary objects in the most unexpected places.

It was a documentary calledFinding Vivian Maier, Park recalled. She worked as a nanny to children and at one estate sale one young man bought a lot of her films, and thats how this photographer Vivian Maier came to light. It provided lots of inspiration forCarol, starring Rooney Mara.

Seated at a long wooden table in the corner of a bustling Austin brewery armed with sampler flights of local craft beers, we toasted with a Bavarian-style lager dubbed the Hell Yes, and Park admitted that he prefers Texas BBQ to Korean BBQ. I just dont like marinated meat, he smiled. Please know this: Not all Koreans are fans ofbulgogi. He is, however, something of a beer connoisseur, although homegrown suds have a ways to go. Im really into the Belgian beers, Belgian ales. Korean beer is notorious for being the worst beer in the entire world, he lamented. But recently, a savior has risen in Korea! One of the big beer breweries has started to brew ales. Its very good.

Back home with friends when bar-hopping turns to karaokepractically a national pastimethats my cue to go home.

I envy those people who can play like that, he mused. But I wasnt born that way, unfortunately. Ive overcome a lot of my shyness over the years. Now I can do interviews and go onstage to introduce my films. Its always a difficult thing to do but the work has transformed me. Still, when I walk down the street and see myself on one of those big LED screens on the side of the building, I cringe.

Parks films, however, are quite the opposite: Bold, ballsy, stylish, and often intensely brutal, theyve come to represent the pinnacle of Koreas art house extreme. His is a signature thats difficult to replicate. But despite not yet having seen Spike Lees American remake of Oldboyitself an adaptation of a Japanese mangahes all for the reinterpretation of art. If he had to remake one of Lees films, Park mulled, it would be Jungle Fever.

InThe Handmaiden, Octobers sweeping and engrossing thriller set during Japanese colonial rule in Korea and adapted loosely from Sarah Waters England-set novelFingersmith, director Parks stamp is as evident as ever. Newcomer Kim Tae-ri stars as Sook-hee, a young Korean woman whos sent to work as the new handmaiden to Japanese noblewoman Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee), who lives in quiet obedience to a Korean-born uncle whos obsessed with Japanese and Western culture. The twistat least, thefirsttwistis that Sook-hees really there to help swindle Hideko out of her fortune and take her place. The rest of The Handmaidens sublime treasures are best unspoiled save for the fact that the two women fall headlong in lovemaking for some steamy lesbian sex scenes that seized critics attention out of Cannes, as well as Parks most romantic film to date.

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Park had wanted for a long time to portray a homosexual character onscreen, particularly in a Korean society that rarely sees such stories told. I knew I wanted to deal with the subject someday, he said. What kind of homosexual film? The kind where the protagonist, who is homosexual, is not afraid of his or her sexualityand is not suffering under the critical eye of a conservative society. I wanted to make a film free of all that.

He sips another sampler glass, a crisp pilsner a little too dry for his tastes. In this film, for the characters who have fallen in love with each other, its just a matter of course. Theres no question about it. The issue they have to overcome is entirely something else, in that one is supposed to be deceiving the other:Am I allowed to love the person Im tricking?There are other issues besides being the same sex.

In addition to depicting the magnetic attraction between its two female protagonists in tender and exquisite detail, The Handmaiden features some of the most frankly sensual lesbian lovemaking scenes sinceBlue is the Warmest Color. Like that films same-sex sex scenes, the film risks incurring criticisms of a leering male gaze, but they also unfold with a keen sense of humor that makes the steamy symmetry of his actresses nude gymnastics less lascivious and more lovingly real.

The humor is the crux, he emphasized. These sex scenes arent all about the panting, the sweating, the going through the motions. They constantly talk to each other, and they look at each others face, and they make jokes.

Sook-hee and Hideko are also two complex characters whose inner workings reflect bigger themes asThe Handmaidenunspools one layer after another. In transplanting the original novels setting to colonial Korea, Park seeded The Handmaidenwith pointed cultural criticisms loaded with meaning for the Korea of today as much as that of yesterday.

Films in Korea thus far which have depicted the colonial period were all about independent movements or resistance fighters, he said. But this film is all about falling in love with a Japanese woman. The villain is actually of Korean ethnicity. His mind, his inner workings, shows that of a typical Japanese sympathizercolonial lackeyat the time. We have enough stories and films about those who fought against Japanese imperialists. Why dont we show and talk about the Koreans who worshipped the Japanese?

He elaborated: My point is that this continues to this day. The only thing thats different is they no longer worship the Japanese imperialistsin their place, they worship the Americans. And rather than idolize American values, they have internalized American values.

In recent years, Park lent his voice to public petitions protesting his governments arms sales to Israel and the censorship of the Busan Film Festival (Compared to the people who put everything they have on the line for these fights and causes, its nothing, he said.) But its no coincidence that Park says what worries him the most about the world is the unequal distribution of wealth both at home in Korea and across the world at large.

Im not saying that everything about America is wrong, he said. Neither am I saying that everything from overseas is wrong. Im saying that everything needs to be in balance between whats our own and whats foreign, among those who have the money, the power, and the informationthe ruling class. One of the reasons some Americans say that this election is pointless is that whoever wins the election, well end up with the same world where capitalism is king.

Park also saw in The Handmaiden the chance to actively battle an industry-wide problem hed started to notice: The underrepresentation of female characters in film. Certainly my interest in young women has gone up because Im the father of a daughter, he said, raising a hoppy IPA to his lips, and it helped me to realize how in cinema there arent many films that deal with the desires of a young woman in an honest way. Films dont tend to portray women as the main subject. It helped me become aware of this problem.

He started showing his films to his daughter, whos now studying art at university, when she was a childwell, all of them except forOldboy, for obvious reasons. Because there was a father-daughter relationship I couldnt bring myself to show it to her, he said. She saw it when she went to university. Fortunately she likes my films. Both women in his life nameThe Handmaidenas their favorite movie of his.

I have heard there is a debate at this film festival where a verbal debate is followed by a boxing match, he smiled, referring to the annual Fantastic Fest spectacle known as the Fantastic Debates, where filmmakers and critics face off over vital cinematic topics and determine the ultimate winner by pounding it out in the ring. I wouldlovefor someone to step up and put this to the test: Prove that all of Park Chan-wooks films are romantic films.

Its ironic to Park, and perhaps a bit frustrating, that he might be known as an artist most concerned with stories of violent revengealthough his films, includingThe Handmaiden, have that, too. Deep down, hes got a romantic streak. It peeks out when he describes how, years ago, he met his wife and saw Vertigo for the first time, and thus fell in love twice on the same day. Creatively I ask her for her opinions and I take a lot of her suggestions, he said. And shes my first love.

Why, then, does he think his films tend toward boundary-pushing extremes of human behavior, like incest, betrayal, mutilation, and extreme violence? Because Ive lived such a boring and mundane life, he shrugged. Every storyteller should never confine themselves to the very small limits of their own experience. Rather, they should be able to put themselves in the position of every different kind of human beingand sometimes non-human beings, as well.

If Park has the ability to put himself in the paws of animals for the sake of art, does he feel bad even years later, for the poor octopi that gave their lives to be eaten by Choi Min-sik inOldboy, in whats still one of the most indelible scenes hes ever filmed?

He considered it, sipping a hoppy red named the Big Mama, a dish of bacon-wrapped quail between us. Not really, he said. In Korea, live octopus is served sliced into pieces, still wriggling on the plate. What difference does it make if its eaten chopped or whole?

Some cephalopod enthusiasts argue that octopi, with their uncanny abilities to liberate themselves from tanks and multitask, are creatures of consciousness who maybe even have souls. I explained how its a thought that haunts me every time I rewatch that scene in Oldboy, the tentacles writhing in Oh Dae-sus mouth as he renders its owner apartarguably that films most sensual and sensory moment, a visceral collision of art, life, and real violence.

Director Park gave it another moments thought. Im not sure whether the existence of a soul equates to your level of intellectual ability. Do we say that snappers dont have souls, but octopi do? If thats the case, what about cows and pigs? he countered, a twinkle in his eye. Youve seenBabe, right?

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/2017/06/25/inside-the-handmaiden-a-lesbian-erotic-thriller-and-the-sexiest-film-of-the-year/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/162228109327

[samanthasroberts]

Inside The Handmaiden: A Lesbian Erotic Thriller and the Sexiest Film of the Year

Acclaimed filmmaker Park Chan-wook (‘Oldboy’) opens up about his upcoming film over beers with Jen Yamato in Austin, Texas. “>

Halfway through his first trip to Texas, Korean auteur Park Chan-wook found himself on a tour of a picturesque religious compound notorious for the sex crimes of a cult-like spiritual leader. Five years ago, its once-venerated guru Prakashanand Saraswati fled the country, escaping a trial that saw him sentencedin absentiato over two centuries in prison. On a hot Texas afternoon in September, the director ofOldboystrolled the grounds with his Leica taking in the palatial white granite architecture.

Park was taken by the sights and the lurid true tale, soaking in the experience as he seems to all his travels. The director and avid photographer had come to Austin to screen his Cannes hitThe Handmaidenat Fantastic Fest following its Toronto premiere. Hed tasted Texas BBQ. Hed shopped for trinkets along South Congress Ave. When we met to discuss his period lesbian love-thriller over fine Texan beers this week, he was still marveling at the beauty and hidden perversity forever tied to the Barsana Dham.

It reminded me a little of Uncle Kouzuki inThe Handmaiden, he joked of one of the many deliciously complex characters in his new film, speaking through his traveling companion and translator, Wonjo Jeong. Im a photographer. I thought going to a place like this Id be able to capture some absurd images on my camera. The power that religion has over people, how it draws people in, is always amazing.

Park, arguably Koreas most famed and celebrated filmmaker, made his directorial debut in 1992 and scored his first huge hit in 2000 with the record-breakingJ.S.A.: Joint Security Area, a military thriller about a mysterious murder between soldiers from North and South Korea. In 2003 he released his intoxicatingly elegiac revenge thrillerOldboyand became forever synonymous with its brand of hyperviolent, perverse brutality.

But there are stratums to Parks films, even as they tend toward the extremes of genre, from the two other films that round out hisVengeance Trilogyto his vampire taleThirstto 2013sStoker, the gothic potboiler that marked his English-language Hollywood debut. Consider: When he describes to me the walrus carved from walrus tusk hed just bought at one of Austins eclectic thrift stores, the conversation winds its way to a documentary hed enjoyed, also on the subject of discovering extraordinary objects in the most unexpected places.

It was a documentary calledFinding Vivian Maier, Park recalled. She worked as a nanny to children and at one estate sale one young man bought a lot of her films, and thats how this photographer Vivian Maier came to light. It provided lots of inspiration forCarol, starring Rooney Mara.

Seated at a long wooden table in the corner of a bustling Austin brewery armed with sampler flights of local craft beers, we toasted with a Bavarian-style lager dubbed the Hell Yes, and Park admitted that he prefers Texas BBQ to Korean BBQ. I just dont like marinated meat, he smiled. Please know this: Not all Koreans are fans ofbulgogi. He is, however, something of a beer connoisseur, although homegrown suds have a ways to go. Im really into the Belgian beers, Belgian ales. Korean beer is notorious for being the worst beer in the entire world, he lamented. But recently, a savior has risen in Korea! One of the big beer breweries has started to brew ales. Its very good.

Back home with friends when bar-hopping turns to karaokepractically a national pastimethats my cue to go home.

I envy those people who can play like that, he mused. But I wasnt born that way, unfortunately. Ive overcome a lot of my shyness over the years. Now I can do interviews and go onstage to introduce my films. Its always a difficult thing to do but the work has transformed me. Still, when I walk down the street and see myself on one of those big LED screens on the side of the building, I cringe.

Parks films, however, are quite the opposite: Bold, ballsy, stylish, and often intensely brutal, theyve come to represent the pinnacle of Koreas art house extreme. His is a signature thats difficult to replicate. But despite not yet having seen Spike Lees American remake of Oldboyitself an adaptation of a Japanese mangahes all for the reinterpretation of art. If he had to remake one of Lees films, Park mulled, it would be Jungle Fever.

InThe Handmaiden, Octobers sweeping and engrossing thriller set during Japanese colonial rule in Korea and adapted loosely from Sarah Waters England-set novelFingersmith, director Parks stamp is as evident as ever. Newcomer Kim Tae-ri stars as Sook-hee, a young Korean woman whos sent to work as the new handmaiden to Japanese noblewoman Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee), who lives in quiet obedience to a Korean-born uncle whos obsessed with Japanese and Western culture. The twistat least, thefirsttwistis that Sook-hees really there to help swindle Hideko out of her fortune and take her place. The rest of The Handmaidens sublime treasures are best unspoiled save for the fact that the two women fall headlong in lovemaking for some steamy lesbian sex scenes that seized critics attention out of Cannes, as well as Parks most romantic film to date.

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Park had wanted for a long time to portray a homosexual character onscreen, particularly in a Korean society that rarely sees such stories told. I knew I wanted to deal with the subject someday, he said. What kind of homosexual film? The kind where the protagonist, who is homosexual, is not afraid of his or her sexualityand is not suffering under the critical eye of a conservative society. I wanted to make a film free of all that.

He sips another sampler glass, a crisp pilsner a little too dry for his tastes. In this film, for the characters who have fallen in love with each other, its just a matter of course. Theres no question about it. The issue they have to overcome is entirely something else, in that one is supposed to be deceiving the other:Am I allowed to love the person Im tricking?There are other issues besides being the same sex.

In addition to depicting the magnetic attraction between its two female protagonists in tender and exquisite detail, The Handmaiden features some of the most frankly sensual lesbian lovemaking scenes sinceBlue is the Warmest Color. Like that films same-sex sex scenes, the film risks incurring criticisms of a leering male gaze, but they also unfold with a keen sense of humor that makes the steamy symmetry of his actresses nude gymnastics less lascivious and more lovingly real.

The humor is the crux, he emphasized. These sex scenes arent all about the panting, the sweating, the going through the motions. They constantly talk to each other, and they look at each others face, and they make jokes.

Sook-hee and Hideko are also two complex characters whose inner workings reflect bigger themes asThe Handmaidenunspools one layer after another. In transplanting the original novels setting to colonial Korea, Park seeded The Handmaidenwith pointed cultural criticisms loaded with meaning for the Korea of today as much as that of yesterday.

Films in Korea thus far which have depicted the colonial period were all about independent movements or resistance fighters, he said. But this film is all about falling in love with a Japanese woman. The villain is actually of Korean ethnicity. His mind, his inner workings, shows that of a typical Japanese sympathizercolonial lackeyat the time. We have enough stories and films about those who fought against Japanese imperialists. Why dont we show and talk about the Koreans who worshipped the Japanese?

He elaborated: My point is that this continues to this day. The only thing thats different is they no longer worship the Japanese imperialistsin their place, they worship the Americans. And rather than idolize American values, they have internalized American values.

In recent years, Park lent his voice to public petitions protesting his governments arms sales to Israel and the censorship of the Busan Film Festival (Compared to the people who put everything they have on the line for these fights and causes, its nothing, he said.) But its no coincidence that Park says what worries him the most about the world is the unequal distribution of wealth both at home in Korea and across the world at large.

Im not saying that everything about America is wrong, he said. Neither am I saying that everything from overseas is wrong. Im saying that everything needs to be in balance between whats our own and whats foreign, among those who have the money, the power, and the informationthe ruling class. One of the reasons some Americans say that this election is pointless is that whoever wins the election, well end up with the same world where capitalism is king.

Park also saw in The Handmaiden the chance to actively battle an industry-wide problem hed started to notice: The underrepresentation of female characters in film. Certainly my interest in young women has gone up because Im the father of a daughter, he said, raising a hoppy IPA to his lips, and it helped me to realize how in cinema there arent many films that deal with the desires of a young woman in an honest way. Films dont tend to portray women as the main subject. It helped me become aware of this problem.

He started showing his films to his daughter, whos now studying art at university, when she was a childwell, all of them except forOldboy, for obvious reasons. Because there was a father-daughter relationship I couldnt bring myself to show it to her, he said. She saw it when she went to university. Fortunately she likes my films. Both women in his life nameThe Handmaidenas their favorite movie of his.

I have heard there is a debate at this film festival where a verbal debate is followed by a boxing match, he smiled, referring to the annual Fantastic Fest spectacle known as the Fantastic Debates, where filmmakers and critics face off over vital cinematic topics and determine the ultimate winner by pounding it out in the ring. I wouldlovefor someone to step up and put this to the test: Prove that all of Park Chan-wooks films are romantic films.

Its ironic to Park, and perhaps a bit frustrating, that he might be known as an artist most concerned with stories of violent revengealthough his films, includingThe Handmaiden, have that, too. Deep down, hes got a romantic streak. It peeks out when he describes how, years ago, he met his wife and saw Vertigo for the first time, and thus fell in love twice on the same day. Creatively I ask her for her opinions and I take a lot of her suggestions, he said. And shes my first love.

Why, then, does he think his films tend toward boundary-pushing extremes of human behavior, like incest, betrayal, mutilation, and extreme violence? Because Ive lived such a boring and mundane life, he shrugged. Every storyteller should never confine themselves to the very small limits of their own experience. Rather, they should be able to put themselves in the position of every different kind of human beingand sometimes non-human beings, as well.

If Park has the ability to put himself in the paws of animals for the sake of art, does he feel bad even years later, for the poor octopi that gave their lives to be eaten by Choi Min-sik inOldboy, in whats still one of the most indelible scenes hes ever filmed?

He considered it, sipping a hoppy red named the Big Mama, a dish of bacon-wrapped quail between us. Not really, he said. In Korea, live octopus is served sliced into pieces, still wriggling on the plate. What difference does it make if its eaten chopped or whole?

Some cephalopod enthusiasts argue that octopi, with their uncanny abilities to liberate themselves from tanks and multitask, are creatures of consciousness who maybe even have souls. I explained how its a thought that haunts me every time I rewatch that scene in Oldboy, the tentacles writhing in Oh Dae-sus mouth as he renders its owner apartarguably that films most sensual and sensory moment, a visceral collision of art, life, and real violence.

Director Park gave it another moments thought. Im not sure whether the existence of a soul equates to your level of intellectual ability. Do we say that snappers dont have souls, but octopi do? If thats the case, what about cows and pigs? he countered, a twinkle in his eye. Youve seenBabe, right?

Source: http://allofbeer.com/2017/06/25/inside-the-handmaiden-a-lesbian-erotic-thriller-and-the-sexiest-film-of-the-year/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2017/06/25/inside-the-handmaiden-a-lesbian-erotic-thriller-and-the-sexiest-film-of-the-year/

[allofbeercom]

Inside The Handmaiden: A Lesbian Erotic Thriller and the Sexiest Film of the Year

Acclaimed filmmaker Park Chan-wook (‘Oldboy’) opens up about his upcoming film over beers with Jen Yamato in Austin, Texas. “>

Halfway through his first trip to Texas, Korean auteur Park Chan-wook found himself on a tour of a picturesque religious compound notorious for the sex crimes of a cult-like spiritual leader. Five years ago, its once-venerated guru Prakashanand Saraswati fled the country, escaping a trial that saw him sentencedin absentiato over two centuries in prison. On a hot Texas afternoon in September, the director ofOldboystrolled the grounds with his Leica taking in the palatial white granite architecture.

Park was taken by the sights and the lurid true tale, soaking in the experience as he seems to all his travels. The director and avid photographer had come to Austin to screen his Cannes hitThe Handmaidenat Fantastic Fest following its Toronto premiere. Hed tasted Texas BBQ. Hed shopped for trinkets along South Congress Ave. When we met to discuss his period lesbian love-thriller over fine Texan beers this week, he was still marveling at the beauty and hidden perversity forever tied to the Barsana Dham.

It reminded me a little of Uncle Kouzuki inThe Handmaiden, he joked of one of the many deliciously complex characters in his new film, speaking through his traveling companion and translator, Wonjo Jeong. Im a photographer. I thought going to a place like this Id be able to capture some absurd images on my camera. The power that religion has over people, how it draws people in, is always amazing.

Park, arguably Koreas most famed and celebrated filmmaker, made his directorial debut in 1992 and scored his first huge hit in 2000 with the record-breakingJ.S.A.: Joint Security Area, a military thriller about a mysterious murder between soldiers from North and South Korea. In 2003 he released his intoxicatingly elegiac revenge thrillerOldboyand became forever synonymous with its brand of hyperviolent, perverse brutality.

But there are stratums to Parks films, even as they tend toward the extremes of genre, from the two other films that round out hisVengeance Trilogyto his vampire taleThirstto 2013sStoker, the gothic potboiler that marked his English-language Hollywood debut. Consider: When he describes to me the walrus carved from walrus tusk hed just bought at one of Austins eclectic thrift stores, the conversation winds its way to a documentary hed enjoyed, also on the subject of discovering extraordinary objects in the most unexpected places.

It was a documentary calledFinding Vivian Maier, Park recalled. She worked as a nanny to children and at one estate sale one young man bought a lot of her films, and thats how this photographer Vivian Maier came to light. It provided lots of inspiration forCarol, starring Rooney Mara.

Seated at a long wooden table in the corner of a bustling Austin brewery armed with sampler flights of local craft beers, we toasted with a Bavarian-style lager dubbed the Hell Yes, and Park admitted that he prefers Texas BBQ to Korean BBQ. I just dont like marinated meat, he smiled. Please know this: Not all Koreans are fans ofbulgogi. He is, however, something of a beer connoisseur, although homegrown suds have a ways to go. Im really into the Belgian beers, Belgian ales. Korean beer is notorious for being the worst beer in the entire world, he lamented. But recently, a savior has risen in Korea! One of the big beer breweries has started to brew ales. Its very good.

Back home with friends when bar-hopping turns to karaokepractically a national pastimethats my cue to go home.

I envy those people who can play like that, he mused. But I wasnt born that way, unfortunately. Ive overcome a lot of my shyness over the years. Now I can do interviews and go onstage to introduce my films. Its always a difficult thing to do but the work has transformed me. Still, when I walk down the street and see myself on one of those big LED screens on the side of the building, I cringe.

Parks films, however, are quite the opposite: Bold, ballsy, stylish, and often intensely brutal, theyve come to represent the pinnacle of Koreas art house extreme. His is a signature thats difficult to replicate. But despite not yet having seen Spike Lees American remake of Oldboyitself an adaptation of a Japanese mangahes all for the reinterpretation of art. If he had to remake one of Lees films, Park mulled, it would be Jungle Fever.

InThe Handmaiden, Octobers sweeping and engrossing thriller set during Japanese colonial rule in Korea and adapted loosely from Sarah Waters England-set novelFingersmith, director Parks stamp is as evident as ever. Newcomer Kim Tae-ri stars as Sook-hee, a young Korean woman whos sent to work as the new handmaiden to Japanese noblewoman Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee), who lives in quiet obedience to a Korean-born uncle whos obsessed with Japanese and Western culture. The twistat least, thefirsttwistis that Sook-hees really there to help swindle Hideko out of her fortune and take her place. The rest of The Handmaidens sublime treasures are best unspoiled save for the fact that the two women fall headlong in lovemaking for some steamy lesbian sex scenes that seized critics attention out of Cannes, as well as Parks most romantic film to date.

Get The Beast In Your Inbox!

Daily DigestStart and finish your day with the top stories from The Daily Beast.

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By clicking "Subscribe," you agree to have read the TermsofUse and PrivacyPolicy

Subscribe

Thank You!

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Park had wanted for a long time to portray a homosexual character onscreen, particularly in a Korean society that rarely sees such stories told. I knew I wanted to deal with the subject someday, he said. What kind of homosexual film? The kind where the protagonist, who is homosexual, is not afraid of his or her sexualityand is not suffering under the critical eye of a conservative society. I wanted to make a film free of all that.

He sips another sampler glass, a crisp pilsner a little too dry for his tastes. In this film, for the characters who have fallen in love with each other, its just a matter of course. Theres no question about it. The issue they have to overcome is entirely something else, in that one is supposed to be deceiving the other:Am I allowed to love the person Im tricking?There are other issues besides being the same sex.

In addition to depicting the magnetic attraction between its two female protagonists in tender and exquisite detail, The Handmaiden features some of the most frankly sensual lesbian lovemaking scenes sinceBlue is the Warmest Color. Like that films same-sex sex scenes, the film risks incurring criticisms of a leering male gaze, but they also unfold with a keen sense of humor that makes the steamy symmetry of his actresses nude gymnastics less lascivious and more lovingly real.

The humor is the crux, he emphasized. These sex scenes arent all about the panting, the sweating, the going through the motions. They constantly talk to each other, and they look at each others face, and they make jokes.

Sook-hee and Hideko are also two complex characters whose inner workings reflect bigger themes asThe Handmaidenunspools one layer after another. In transplanting the original novels setting to colonial Korea, Park seeded The Handmaidenwith pointed cultural criticisms loaded with meaning for the Korea of today as much as that of yesterday.

Films in Korea thus far which have depicted the colonial period were all about independent movements or resistance fighters, he said. But this film is all about falling in love with a Japanese woman. The villain is actually of Korean ethnicity. His mind, his inner workings, shows that of a typical Japanese sympathizercolonial lackeyat the time. We have enough stories and films about those who fought against Japanese imperialists. Why dont we show and talk about the Koreans who worshipped the Japanese?

He elaborated: My point is that this continues to this day. The only thing thats different is they no longer worship the Japanese imperialistsin their place, they worship the Americans. And rather than idolize American values, they have internalized American values.

In recent years, Park lent his voice to public petitions protesting his governments arms sales to Israel and the censorship of the Busan Film Festival (Compared to the people who put everything they have on the line for these fights and causes, its nothing, he said.) But its no coincidence that Park says what worries him the most about the world is the unequal distribution of wealth both at home in Korea and across the world at large.

Im not saying that everything about America is wrong, he said. Neither am I saying that everything from overseas is wrong. Im saying that everything needs to be in balance between whats our own and whats foreign, among those who have the money, the power, and the informationthe ruling class. One of the reasons some Americans say that this election is pointless is that whoever wins the election, well end up with the same world where capitalism is king.

Park also saw in The Handmaiden the chance to actively battle an industry-wide problem hed started to notice: The underrepresentation of female characters in film. Certainly my interest in young women has gone up because Im the father of a daughter, he said, raising a hoppy IPA to his lips, and it helped me to realize how in cinema there arent many films that deal with the desires of a young woman in an honest way. Films dont tend to portray women as the main subject. It helped me become aware of this problem.

He started showing his films to his daughter, whos now studying art at university, when she was a childwell, all of them except forOldboy, for obvious reasons. Because there was a father-daughter relationship I couldnt bring myself to show it to her, he said. She saw it when she went to university. Fortunately she likes my films. Both women in his life nameThe Handmaidenas their favorite movie of his.

I have heard there is a debate at this film festival where a verbal debate is followed by a boxing match, he smiled, referring to the annual Fantastic Fest spectacle known as the Fantastic Debates, where filmmakers and critics face off over vital cinematic topics and determine the ultimate winner by pounding it out in the ring. I wouldlovefor someone to step up and put this to the test: Prove that all of Park Chan-wooks films are romantic films.

Its ironic to Park, and perhaps a bit frustrating, that he might be known as an artist most concerned with stories of violent revengealthough his films, includingThe Handmaiden, have that, too. Deep down, hes got a romantic streak. It peeks out when he describes how, years ago, he met his wife and saw Vertigo for the first time, and thus fell in love twice on the same day. Creatively I ask her for her opinions and I take a lot of her suggestions, he said. And shes my first love.

Why, then, does he think his films tend toward boundary-pushing extremes of human behavior, like incest, betrayal, mutilation, and extreme violence? Because Ive lived such a boring and mundane life, he shrugged. Every storyteller should never confine themselves to the very small limits of their own experience. Rather, they should be able to put themselves in the position of every different kind of human beingand sometimes non-human beings, as well.

If Park has the ability to put himself in the paws of animals for the sake of art, does he feel bad even years later, for the poor octopi that gave their lives to be eaten by Choi Min-sik inOldboy, in whats still one of the most indelible scenes hes ever filmed?

He considered it, sipping a hoppy red named the Big Mama, a dish of bacon-wrapped quail between us. Not really, he said. In Korea, live octopus is served sliced into pieces, still wriggling on the plate. What difference does it make if its eaten chopped or whole?

Some cephalopod enthusiasts argue that octopi, with their uncanny abilities to liberate themselves from tanks and multitask, are creatures of consciousness who maybe even have souls. I explained how its a thought that haunts me every time I rewatch that scene in Oldboy, the tentacles writhing in Oh Dae-sus mouth as he renders its owner apartarguably that films most sensual and sensory moment, a visceral collision of art, life, and real violence.

Director Park gave it another moments thought. Im not sure whether the existence of a soul equates to your level of intellectual ability. Do we say that snappers dont have souls, but octopi do? If thats the case, what about cows and pigs? he countered, a twinkle in his eye. Youve seenBabe, right?

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/2017/06/25/inside-the-handmaiden-a-lesbian-erotic-thriller-and-the-sexiest-film-of-the-year/

[floraexplorer]

Eight Travel Bloggers Who Write Books Too

When I was young, my favourite authors were those I felt I knew.

I lived and breathed the Famous Five and Tracey Beaker, wanted desperately to become a dancer in Ballet Shoes, and dreamed of sailing away across the seas in a giant peach. Their creators – people like Judy Blume, Jacqueline Wilson, Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl and Noel Streatfeild – all had direct access to my heart, because I was certain they were speaking directly to me.

When I was eleven years old, something monumental happened: Harry Potter slipped quietly onto my bookshelf, and his arrival heralded an annual tradition. Each summer for the next seven years, J.K. Rowling whispered magic into my ear while I lay on my stomach, feverishly reading her books as the July heat sweated outside.

Although I don’t think about it so much now, viewing writers as your friends is an extremely valuable part of loving to read. The authors who remained at a distance from me were the ones I couldn’t connect with, either through their words or what they said.

In comparison, I’ll always remember how tangible the world of Harry Potter was; how it changed with me as I grew older, and how comfortable, familiar and ‘right’ it always felt.

That’s what I strive for in my own writing, and that’s what I look for in the work of other writers. A sense of connection between the characters, their creators, and you.

Bridging the gap between blogs and books

The beauty of today’s online, social-media-filled world is that we can actually get to know our favourite writers, in ways we never could before. There’s a sense of absolute joy when you finish reading a fantastic book and Google the author, only to discover they’ve been blogging about their entire writing process, sharing the images which inspire them, or they’re being extremely outspoken on Twitter (anyone who follows J.K. Rowling’s tweets will know what I mean).

And it works the other way, too: plenty of people who’ve spent years writing online have ended up publishing books as a result.

These eight faces above are a collection of my favourite travel bloggers who’ve also become successfully published authors. Some I know personally, others I’ve only ever read from afar – but all of these writers (who all happen to be women – a happy accident!) have an online presence which means their books are an extension of the online selves I already feel I know.

They also all have a beautiful way with words, and individually have each inspired me to become a better writer. Happy #NationalWritingDay, ladies!

1.

‘Mother Tongue’ by Christine Gilbert

Christine Gilbert wrote ‘Mother Tongue’ after spending three years travelling with her husband, young son and eventually their baby daughter through China, Lebanon and Mexico in an attempt to learn the local language of each place.

The book itself is part memoir, part travelogue and part investigation into the ways the brain develops and changes through learning more than one language, both theoretically and in practice. Thanks to my mild obsession with learning Spanish I found this whole concept seriously interesting – especially because Christine seemed stoically determined to challenge herself. Who else dares to undergo a C-section with a team of Mexican nurses when she doesn’t understand what they’re saying?!

Christine’s blog: Almost Fearless 

  2.

‘Love with a Chance of Drowning’ by Torre de Roche

Torre de Roche’s book reads a little like a Hollywood movie – so it makes sense that the film rights are being optioned. When Torre met a handsome stranger who asked her to sail across the Pacific with him, her major hesitation was a deep-seated fear of the sea. And boats. And seasickness, and multiple other things besides.

So of course she decided to board a boat for a year, right? What could possibly go wrong?

‘Love With a Chance of Drowning’ is the kind of travel adventure we all dream of having, but what’s even better is Torre’s romantic yet daring attitude, which sees her weathering the roughest of storms. I really hope this book ends up as a film – and I also hope I eventually manage to visit all the locations mentioned!

Torre’s blog: The Fearful Adventurer

  3.

‘How Not to Travel the World’ by Lauren Juliff

If you’ve ever read Lauren’s blog, you’ll know her self-prescribed tagline is being a ‘disaster-prone backpacker’, and her memoir certainly doesn’t disappoint.

‘How Not to Travel the World’ follows Lauren’s backpacking journey through Europe and Asia as she deals with her various phobias (hygiene, food and a general lack of life experience are some of her self-confessed significant issues); navigates her way through various difficulties (a potential tsunami, drunk backpackers and sexual harassment in hostels); and eventually meets a male backpacker named Dave.

I read this book voraciously when on a nineteen hour bus ride from London to Spain before starting the Camino. It’s a perfect holiday read – and great for anyone who’s ever embarrassed themselves abroad.

Lauren’s blog: Never Ending Footsteps

  4.

‘The Yellow Envelope’ by Kim Dinan

The concept behind Kim’s book is one I absolutely love: before she and her husband Brian set off on their world travels, a friend gave them both a yellow envelope. Inside was a substantial amount of money, along with instructions to give the money away in whichever method they saw fit. The only three rules for the envelope?

‘(1) Don’t overthink it; (2) share your experiences; (3) don’t feel pressured to give it all away.’

What follows is not just a retelling of Kim and Brian’s adventures, but an exploration of Kim’s self-reflection and self-doubt as they journey further away from home and become steadily more distant from each other. I recognised a lot of myself in Kim, and felt myself hurrying her onward through each struggle and championing her successes when they came. Anyone who believes in the power of generosity will love this book.

Kim’s blog: So Many Places

  5.

‘Miss-adventures in South America’ by Amy Baker

As someone obsessed with South America, Amy’s book had me hooked. During her three months spent backpacking solo around the continent, she often arrived in cities I knew or booked into hostels I stayed in, and every time I felt the familiar pangs of Latino life – except Amy’s sharp, hilarious and quintessentially British humour made me see my favourite continent in a whole new light.

‘Miss-Adventures in South America’ is ingeniously structured around the best and worst pieces of advice Amy’s ever received (many of which will be familiar to other solo female travellers) and it’s an inspirational read for anyone planning to travel by themselves.

Amy’s blog: Amy Baker Writes

NB: Amy also runs a rather marvellous event called ‘The Riff Raff’, a monthly meet-up in London for debut and aspiring authors to discuss and support each other’s work. I went to the first event and can already see it being a fantastic place to network and learn about new writers!

  6.

‘All Over the Place: Adventures in Travel, True Love, and Petty Theft’ by Geraldine DeRuiter

Although I haven’t managed to read ‘All Over the Place’ yet, I have no doubt that Geraldine’s book is everything her fantastic blog is: hilarious, witty, and extremely clever.

The book chronicles a five-year period of Geraldine’s world travels, delivering her insights on a range of topics from unemployment and brain tumours to lost luggage, lost opportunities, and generally getting lost in countless terminals and cabs and hotel lobbies across the globe. As someone who often finds themselves getting lost, I’m sure many of Geraldine’s escapades will ring true for me.

Geraldine’s blog: The Everywhereist

  7.

‘The Guilty Wife’ by Elle Croft

In amongst all these travelogues and memoirs is an exciting slice of crime fiction! Elle’s book is still awaiting publication (it’ll be out on 30th November 2017) but as a long-standing reader of her site, I’m extremely excited to see what her debut novel is all about.

Amazon tells me its “a debut psychological thriller that reads as Apple Tree Yard meets Behind Closed Doors, by way of Double Jeopardy”. Sounds good, right?

Elle’s blog: A Bird in the Hand

  8.

Nine Women: Short Stories by Frankie Thompson

I’ve been a long-time reader of Frankie’s wonderful way with words,  so when she began publishing short stories I was first in line to read them.

This particular collection speaks volumes to me: it’s about female experience in all its forms, and Frankie’s ability to convey her characters with subtlety and empathy is really what makes these stories come alive. Particular highlights for me are ‘The Pink Flowers’ and ‘Together, Apart’. If you’re looking for some beautifully told fiction, ‘Nine Women’ won’t disappoint.

Frankie’s blog: As the Bird Flies

  Have you read any fantastic books by travel bloggers which I haven’t mentioned here? Let me know in the comments! 

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