Oscars Fun 2023

I honor the Oscars as most people do—complaining about them—and I rarely discuss them in any systematic way, and I won't be changing that now.  But I will do something I've never done before—consider it a lark, please—because for whatever reason, the silly idea, "whom I personally would nominate and award, were my will in command of the collective mind of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences," has been percolating in my brain for a while.  Maybe it's just because I actually saw a non-trivial number of movies from the foregoing year for the first time in a while, and 2022 turned out to be a reasonably great year overall for cinema, so I wanted to celebrate that.  Or I got tired of reviewing documents at work.  In either case, this is the absolute last possible moment of even marginal relevance for it, and while I'd have liked to have seen all the (actual) Best Picture nominees, at least, rather than just 80% of them, and while this kind of locks down my top five even though I'm not done yet, for this particular game, it's now or never.  So with no further ado (except to say, "yes, they're in order of preference" and "part of the fun will be to see if I remember all the categories"), here's what and whom I'd have picked were I the dictator of industry circle-jerking.

The Encyclopedia Brown: An Early Clarence Brown Compendium

In which we file away The Blue Bird (1918), The Last of the Mohicans (1920), "The Light of Faith" (1922), The Signal Tower (1924), Smouldering Fires (1925), The Goose Woman (1925), The Eagle (1925), and Kiki (1926), plus—talkie bonus!—Navy Blues (1929)

One should not have to "discover" Clarence Brown, but that's the way it is in the year 2022, and the way it has been since, probably, the mid-1950s, when he retired on his own terms to go live on a ranch for the next three decades.  Maybe the word "discover" does too much: he's only as obscure as any Old Hollywood studio man, but such a person can get pretty obscure, after all, because it sometimes feels like so much of the fullness and flavor of Old Hollywood's legacy was lost to the grimly-streamlined Boomer cinematic canon, which became the dull, conformist framework for communicating and teaching film history for the next sixty years.  In any case, discovery is what it felt like to me, when I noticed over the course of about a year that the guy who did The Rains Came was the guy who did The Yearling was the guy who did Flesh and the Devil and I said, "okay, show me" when National Velvet made its rounds on HBOMax and I saw that this, too, was Brown, leading to the statistically-startling and hugely-tantalizing realization that I had seen four Brown movies at more-or-less random but had also seen four masterpieces.

And then, as I do, I got really enthusiastic and burned through Brown's 1941-1947 stretch for no reason but I felt like it, since "what I feel like" is the long and short of my critical ethos here, and as I've gotten a better grasp of the director, it turns out that for whatever reason that stretch in the third decade of his career saw Brown hit not only his stride (just great movie after great movie in the middle of that decade) but also many of his highest peaks, which means that were I to, say, decide upon a more systematic overview of his career, it would be almost guaranteed to be a bit of a let-down.  After all, nobody, not nobody—at least not nobody who had to do what Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer told him to once or twice or three times a year, whether he wanted to do it or not—was likely to have managed to keep that level of superlative quality up.  That's something that his tossed-off second film of 1941, They Met In Bombay, indicates powerfully, despite coming in between Come Live With Me and The Human Comedy.  That's just the business—even beyond the studio system, you should expect even the greatest filmmakers to have fallow periods and the occasional dud—but you know, Brown's late 1920s and 1930s aren't wastelands either.  They absolutely have some peaks of their own, and not just a few, either.

What a hiatus

Quick note made under the perhaps misguided apprehension anyone cares: I've let this lay fallow for I think the longest hiatus in the blog's history, not through any particular design—sure, the pervasive "what is the point?" demotivation that hits me whenever I compare Kinemalogue's readership to, for example, the viewership of even the dumbest YouTube morons, is probably some kind of causal factor, but not the causal factor—but because 1)I've been charged with a downright unusual amount of overtime work for my firm and 2)some manner of illness that I don't think was covid, but, shit, might've been a bacterial sinus infection that opened a door for covid.  Either way, I feel pretty poorly.  (These don't contradict each other that much: the lack of satisfaction or interest are perennial bummers, but the job has its upsides, too.)

Anyway, that's all.  Regular programming should resume at some point soon whenever I work up the energy to puts words to paper for an already half-complete review of Tora! Tora! Tora! (more Fleischer, yeah!) and a review of Don't Worry Darling (sure do wish I liked that movie more, given how much life YouTube morons sucked from it in pursuit of their parasitic work).  Go with God, you amorphous, largely-invisible people that I pretend exist!

The 2010s: Well, goodbye! Have fun on the other side of this door

Okay, yes: I'm not really done with the 2010s yet.  But, you know, I basically am, and am very ready to dispense with a little (actually, characteristically overlong) top ten for that departed decade.  Now, I should still have such a list for 2019, too.  And that's fair enough, considering there aren't any making it onto the list below.  Anyway, while it might seem strange—though I think you'll agree it makes sense—I'm a lot more comfortable with my top ten of the 2010s than I am just my top ten of this past year.  They've been a fairly stable bunch, particularly the top five.  I could have made the same list four weeks ago when it was perfectly of the moment.  I think I stuck it out in the hopes that something would muscle its way to the top of the heap; and, in defense of 2019, it made its most valiant efforts in its final weeks.  Perhaps the year's single strongest gesture only arrived on American shores shortly after it died.  But even if there were some close calls, there was nothing that truly changed my mind, and the odds against any of the films still remaining on my 2019 pile turning out to actually be mind-blowing masterpieces are so low I think it's pretty safe to disregard 'em.

So I should note the honorable mentions (which do include a couple of 2019 films).  They're basically an unsorted nos. 11-30, and some of them could have been higher, and in some cases it would be better for my credibility if they had been.  (Then again, in some cases, it would be even worse.)  In any event, they are truly wonderful films, and I celebrate them each and every one.  It's possible you may be able to guess from this when over the past six years I think my reviews rose to the level of "not terrible."  (If not, well, it was in 2015.)

From 2010: Rupert Wyatt's The Rise of the Planet of the Apes
2011: Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life; Brad Bird's Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol
2012: Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained; Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom; Sam Fell & Chris Butler's ParaNorman; Scott Derrickson's Sinister
2013: Baz Luhrman's The Great Gatsby; Spike Jonze's Her; Michael Bay's Pain & Gain
2014: Eugenio Mira's (and Damien Chazelle's) Grand Piano; Chris Lord & Phil Miller's The LEGO Movie
2015: George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road (oh, I know, I know)
2016: Martin Scorsese's Silence
2017: Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049
2018: Steven Caple Jr.'s Creed II; Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey & Rodney Rothman's Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse
2019: Terrence Malick's A Hidden Life; Makoto Shinkai's Weathering With You

Now here's where I say something that should never have to spoken aloud.  As always, "the best" only means "my personal favorite."  What the hell else could it mean?  There is no such thing as objectivity in the evaluation of art: any argument that "best" and "favorite" are distinct categories is supremely arrogant, and any expression of the notion in practical terms is almost by necessity dishonest.  If being honest means I also have to look a little stupid, that's certainly nothing new.  If it also means that my top ten list, or anybody's top ten list, is only mental masturbation—well, of course it would be.  And while everybody likes to masturbate, and some people like to watch, that doesn't mean anybody involved should pretend it's dignified.  So let's begin.

2017: Movies on the Hell Planet

Though it's obviously unacceptably late in the publication—one's self- and society-imposed deadline for the thing being, at the latest, the day of the Oscars, which passed by, let's see, over two damn months ago—I nevertheless did still have a top ten for last year.  The irony is that I didn't really need the extra time I gave myself!  It hasn't changed since that day, even though I've caught up on over a dozen movies that should (allow me to emphasize the modal language there, should) have been contenders, but usually didn't even really come all that close.  2017 was not a tremendously lousy film year, but it was more solid than good, and it was also one of those years where practically everything great arrived early, leaving you with little but disappointment in the winter.  This is true of life, generally.  I suppose it's also true of many Oscar seasons, though 2017's was remarkably wide-open, rather few of our Best Picture nominees appearing to actually belong there even on the Academy's own narrow terms (indeed, the winner arguably belonged there least of all, so at least 2017's Academy-sanctioned best film was a weird one).  In any event, I can't complain too hard: this is a top ten list that doesn't have any eight-out-of-tens on it, even if the number of ten-out-of-tens seems light, and even if I have some cause to question at least three of my nine-out-of-tens (surprise, surprise, they're the Marvel movies, as well as the artsiest-fartiest movie on the list, which I respected more before I knew how thoroughly it was indebted to Don Hertzfeldt's Such a Beautiful Day, a gen-u-ine masterpiece).  I even question one of my ten-out-of-tens, a little, but I cannot deny the power of that third-placed ten's theatrical presentation; I hate theaters, a lot, and am ready for them to die; but damned if they're not still good for something, after all.

Well, anyway, here's ten movies that are certainly noteworthy, if only occasionally of gemstone-quality.  But first some honorable mentions: for Albert Serra's The Death of Louis XIV, which if I were more of a snob would definitely be on here, because I truly did love it despite it doing very little that movies "ought" to do; and for David Leitch's Atomic Blonde, which has one of the best-choregraphed action sequences in history, maybe the best ever in an American film, and isn't ever boring otherwise (though it is almost always befuddling); and for Darren Aronofsky's mother! and Terrence Malick's Song to Song, which, if the list had been even slightly less good (or if I were less of an easy lay for superheroics), might have shared the no. 10 spot as two very different (but each very pompous) allegorical takes on the same basic Bible story; and for Matt Reeves's War For the Planet of the Apes, the third best Planet of Apes film (which sounds backhanded, but absolutely isn't); and for Steven Spielberg's The Post, yet another Spielberg Chronicle, but this time, one that has no business whatsoever being as good in the telling as it is; and for Andy Muschietti's It, a picture with fundamental, insuperable flaws as a horror film, but which is remarkable nonetheless as such a great triumph of aesthetic and narrative nostalgia; and, finally, for Ken Branagh's Murder On the Orient Express, about which I have recently gushed long enough.

Oh well, no turning back now, even if this was the year I realized I'm probably overrating Marvel movies generally.  (It was the year, after all, of Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2, a movie that goes tediously out of its way to set up its most memorable scene with one that franchise's endless diegetic soundtrack choices, then... plays a remix of Jay and the Americans' "Come a Little Bit Closer"?  I mean, I even like the remix more, but... Mr. Gunn.  James.  Jim.  Jimmy.  We figured out that audiences will accept background music that the characters can't hear, like, ninety years ago.  It would honestly be okay if you did that more often.  This message also applies to David Leitch.)

10. SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING (9/10)
"Best Peter Parker" equals "best Spider-Man movie," and since "Tom Holland" equals "best Peter Parker"... well, I'll let you do the math.  Everything else is just gilding the lily (Michael Keaton's Vulture; the great supporting cast; some of this particular franchise's best action sequences; superhero cinema's best super-chores montage since Superman, period), or more-or-less pleasant noise (Iron Dad).  I don't care if I am overrating them.  Good job, Jon Watts.  Good job, Marvel.

9. LOVING VINCENT (9/10)
By far the most idiosyncratic film on this list, or perhaps of all 2017, Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman's long-time-in-the-coming Loving Vincent tells a story that does not necessarily recommend itself to be told, but it tells it in a revolutionary way, with literal moving paintings, and I really doubt any film made last year was more immediately arresting in the strangeness of its beauty.  Plus I got to put a movie on my top ten that features, as one half of its directing team, a woman.  And that probably shouldn't have taken five years, but I blame Hollywood sexism, rather than myself.

8. THOR: RAGNAROK (9/10)
Possibly the funniest Marvel movie, its second-best-looking, and its first-best-sounding, this is another hit to add to Taika Waititi's list, one of the few directors who've been able to actually cross that line between their independent and obviously-more-passionate work (Hunt for the fuckin' Wilderpeople, guys) and their blockbuster aspirations and make it work without losing themselves in the process.  Still, for some reason, the movie Ragnarok reminds me the most of is Big Trouble In Little China, another shaggy story about a blonde braggart going on a magic quest and finding himself way out of his depth.  Except Ragnarok is way, way bigger, for better and for worse: there've been movies that have wasted Cate Blanchett more thoroughly than this one does, but I can't name even one that's been this blithe about it.

7. A GHOST STORY (9/10)
As noted, David Lowery's look at grief and life and all is basically an expanded (yet far more fettered) version of the last act of It's Such a Beautiful Day... but that doesn't mean it's not excellent on its own terms, and A Ghost Story sees Lowery taking on a far less whimsical and batshit tone, in service of his severe and slow and silent art film, than Hertzfeld does in his wacky one-man animation projects.  So it is melancholy, and punishing in its vision of the depths of time, and it is great.  You know what else was great?  Pete's Dragon, 2016's best E.T.  (Even better than Spielberg's 2016 E.T., The BFG, in fact.)  This Lowery guy turns out to be pretty flexible, even if I'm not sure he can do anything but remake other people's movies, though maybe I should actually see Ain't Them Bodies Saints before I call it Badlands 2: The Quickening.  But that's what I heard!

6. IN THIS CORNER OF THE WORLD (9/10)
A slice-of-life period drama that could only be better than it is if it were more; and, guess what?  That's exactly what Sunao Katabuchi's doing, adding new scenes for a new edition of his film.  Combining great, sometimes-even-frivolous artistry with high-test historical horror, Corner is almost as good as animation got last year.

5. JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 2 (9/10)
Chad Stahleski returns to the character he helped create with an even more intense exploration of the emptiness at the heart of grief than the first time, and John Wick: Chapter 2 is one of film's best takes on the trials of Orpheus.  That it is also 2017's best pure action film... well, that's why it's on this list, anyway.

4. KONG: SKULL ISLAND (9/10)
Jordan Vogt-Roberts' Kong: Skull Island (another example of an indy darling crossing over into the popcorn-littered arena) should not be on a top ten list, I hear you say.  But why?  It was the most efferevescently, stupidly pleasurable first watch I had all last year, full of great monster designs and even more full of crazed, playful nonsense.  It's like Joe Dante willed himself out of the director's graveyard and made Warner Bros. give him a mountain of money, just one more time, to see what would happen, and this time it really, really worked.

3. DUNKIRK (10/10)
A strikingly collectivist (almost to the point of inhuman) take on the war machine called Great Britain, Dunkirk is an experience more than a film as such, but it is a shattering, exhausting one... but not so shattering or exhausting that you cannot feel the pangs of awe at the grandeur of a Spitfire, or the heroism of the little captains of the thousand little boats that saved the Expeditionary Force at Dunkerque.  Truly breathtaking cinema, and Chris Nolan is to be commended, once again.

2. BLADE RUNNER 2049 (10/10)
This film is the 21st century as we know it, reflecting our own uselessness, replaceability, and reproducibility right back at us.  It knows we're fake, and it knows we prefer it this way.  It knows we can't do a damn thing to change the world, and barely do anything that so much as affects anyone else.  It is blockbuster filmmaking as cold, sad, and clammy, and it's explicitly about dying alone.  (Did you know "Joi" is an acronym for a genre of pornography?  It stands for "jerk off instructions," and its signal quality is a simulation of intimacy that acknowledges that you've little choice but to take matters into your own hands.)  It is endlessly gorgeous, even so, and it finally got Roger Deakins his Oscar.  That's important.  It's also important that Denis Villeneuve finally made a movie worthy of his innate talents.  I had lost hope on that, too.  So maybe there is a little hope, after all.  And you know, I just might like it more than the original.  Fuck you; I might.

1. YOUR NAME. (10/10)
It's two sci-fi movies smashed together, but what Makoto Shinkai's movie really is, is the best romance of 2017.  If you said it was the best ever, I'd believe you believed it, and you might even be right.  I don't need to take your word for it.  I could ask one of the theatergoers in Japan who watched this five, ten, twenty times, so many times Shinkai had to tell them to stop.  I get it, now: there is something addictive about it.  Maybe it's just that it's 2017's most outright beautiful animated film, and it's most beautiful film, generally.  Maybe it's that it captures love and loss and longing better than anything I can think of offhand.  Maybe it's that if you keep watching it, all the enormous plot holes get filled in with your affection for everything the movie gets so incredibly right about doomed young love and the glimmers of hope it engenders surviving even a world designed to destroy them.  Maybe it's because it makes me cry like flipping a switch.  And it's not even Shinkai's best film ever?  Get out of town.  Well, it's his best feature, anyway.  His only genuinely good feature, also, yes; but, hey, a masterpiece is a masterpiece, dude.

Just a little housekeeping appendix

Existing to provide a home for the filmmaker's retrospectives I did before switching to my current, superior format, as well as for any less-than-complete "selected works" collections I've done.

DAVID FINCHER (ranked)
10. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (1/10)
9.  Alien 3 (5/10)
8.  Panic Room (5/10)
7.  The Game (5/10)
6.  The Social Network (9/10)
5.  Zodiac (10/10)
4.  Fight Club  (10/10)
3.  Seven (10/10)
2.  The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (10/10)
1.  Gone Girl (10/10) (spoiler review)

Bonus:
Gone Girl (non-spoiler review)

CHRISTOPHER NOLAN (ranked)
10.  Batman Begins (5/10)
9.  Following (6/10)
8.  The Dark Knight Rises (6/10)
7.  Interstellar (6/10)
6.  The Dark Knight (8/10)
5.  Memento (8/10)
4.  Inception (9/10)
3.  Insomnia (10/10)
2.  Dunkirk (10/10)
1.  The Prestige (10/10)

WILLIAM ALLAND (selected works)
It Came From Outer Space (8/10)
The Creature From the Black Lagoon (8/10)
Revenge of the Creature (3/10)
This Island Earth (5/10)
The Creature Walks Among Us (5.01/10)
Tarantula (7/10)
The Deadly Mantis (4/10)
The Land Unknown (3/10)
The Space Children (4/10)
The Colossus of New York (7/10)

JACK ARNOLD (selected works)
It Came From Outer Space (8/10)
The Glass Web (8/10)
The Creature From the Black Lagoon (8/10)
Revenge of the Creature (3/10)
This Island Earth (5/10)
Tarantula (7/10)
The Monolith Monsters (7/10)
The Incredible Shrinking Man (10/10)
The Space Children (4/10)
Monster On the Campus (7/10)
No Name on the Bullet (9/10)

DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS (selected works)
The Mark of Zorro (7/10)
The Three Musketeers (4/10)
Robin Hood (4/10)
The Thief of Bagdad (10/10)
Don Q, Son of Zorro (6/10)
The Black Pirate (9/10)
The Gaucho (5/10)

MASAKI KOBAYASHI (selected works)
"My Sons' Youth" (6/10)
Sincere Heart (7/10)
Samurai Rebellion (9/10)

GEORGE PAL (selected works)
Destination Moon (7/10)
When Worlds Collide (6/10)
The War of the Worlds (6/10)
The Naked Jungle (7/10)
Conquest of Space (4/10)
The Time Machine (8/10)

RIDLEY SCOTT (selected works)
Alien (9/10)
Blade Runner (10/10)
Legend (8/10)
Kingdom of Heaven (8/10)
Prometheus (7/10)
The Counselor (9/10)
The Martian (7/10)
Alien: Covenant (5/10)
Blade Runner 2049 (10/10)

"Be careful driving home—because Christine is out there!"

Sometimes Pittsburgh isn't so bad.  Case in point: Sunday night John Carpenter graced our terrible, economically dysfunctional city with his presence, offering up a live performance that, to the aging director-musician's immense credit, began at 8 o'clock sharp, and boasted a sample of the old and new.  I got to see it, and it was fun—billed as a greatest hits retrospective, it didn't disappoint.  (Also present: Cody Carpenter, doing most of the actual work as lead keyboardist and the member of the Carpenter family who isn't very old—though it should be noted that JC is tremendously sprightly, all things considered, and this made me happy too.  Anyway, Cody certainly did a fine job.)

The set started with the main themes from Escape From New York and Assault on Precinct 13, then dipped into "Vortex" and another Lost Themes track, and continued on in that vein.  I was annoyed, temporarily, that Christine and Prince of Darkness weren't getting any play—especially when the main themes from They Live and In the Mouth of Madness were.  (I remain steadfast in my determination that the score to They Live is perfectly good for the movie, and not of any great account as a musical piece in and of itself; but I will say that Carpenter's reorchestration of the Madness theme has made me better-disposed toward the piece than I had been previously, even if I still think it kind of sucks that that's what he came up with for what is otherwise his finest film.)

Meanwhile, the Halloween theme made its obligatory appearance, and it was fantastic, though the bass-heaviness of the live show did the iconically creepy twinkle of that song absolutely no favors.  It should also surprise no one that the closing credits theme from Village of the Damned didn't show up—whereas Ennio Morricone's opening credits theme from The Thing did, doubtless because this show was designed to trade on JC's status as a director of movies people liked, rather more than his status as a composer who crafted some really great tunes.  (This is clearly how Big Trouble in China wound up in the set.)  But that's a shame, since Carpenter the Composer can stand on his own.  Plus, if he was going to cover other composers' works from movies that he happened to direct, I'd have really loved to have heard what the band would've done with Jack Nitzsche's majestic theme from Starman, which is a far more pleasant piece to listen to on its own.

Well, these are minor points: in the encore, he did get to Prince of Darkness (and that was exciting as hell, even if Prince of Darkness, being in many respects an electronic opera, inevitably gets shorted if one merely excerpts it), and, for the final number, the theme from Christine, and this was the most surprising part of the show for me, because my understanding was that Carpenter was at best indifferent toward the film itself.  But you'd never have guessed it from his introduction of the theme, the loving montage playing behind him, and the placement in the show as the finale.  So right on, JC.  I'm glad you've come around to recognizing that your fourth-best movie is amazing.

But it would've been nice, considering the "retrospective" context, if Carpenter had been more eager to credit his collaborators, above all Alan Howarth.  Still, it's not like this is completely out of line.

There was also some new stuff from Lost Themes II, which I enjoy, but not as much as the last album.  So it goes.  Additionally, Tom Atkins was in the audience, since apparently the poor man lives here.  Unlike every other person in attendance, I did not see the necessity in pestering him, though (in fairness) he seemed to enjoy it, so perhaps I should have.

Altogether, it was great, and you should be jealous of me.  I know I am.

I have an index now! part II: Chronological

Every movie reviewed on Kinemalogue, sorted by year of release, with two sections, the first being films released since the year this blog began (in reverse order, going back to 2013), the second being films released in the years prior to its institution (beginning in 1920, and going forward)

I have an index now! part I: Alphabetical

Every review on Kinemalogue, sorted alphabetically

Unicentennial man

We do things in the hunnerds around here.

We've been eating Gamera, part 0: Ever since I was a lower-case g

Gamera isn't the most important, or the most influential, or the most popular Japanese monster.  That just means the Guardian of the Universe may have to content himself with simply being the best.  This series of reviews is dedicated to my very favorite turtle.


Sure, thanks to MST3K, we've all probably seen the five Gamera movies they riffed twenty times apiece, but unlike the majority of the English-speaking world, my own first exposure to Gamera wasn't alongside Joel and the Bots.  Instead, an unhealthy fraction of my childhood was spent witnessing sweaty men in reptile costumes wrestle in front of an overcranked camera while Japanese people shouted badly-dubbed expository dialogue at each other in cutaway shots.