2018 in FILM

I’m not going to do a full movie post this year. It takes too long. We’re now two months into the new year. But the biggest reason?

I’ve read enough about the “Green Book Travesty” to fill 1,000 Medium posts. Do we really need another?

Headlines like:

The Oscars Thwarted Its Bid for Relevance by Crowning Green Book

The ‘Green Book’ Best Picture Win Enters the Hall of Oscar Travesties

Green Book’s frustrating Best Picture win, explained

Oscars 2019: ‘Green Book’ is the worst best picture winner since ‘Crash’

Not too many takes left after that. But I will share some highlights from the year for me.

My favorite moments from the year in no particular order:

· When Ally first sings Shallow on stage in A Star is Born

· Bobby Maine driving away with tears in his eyes after the last conversation with Jackson in A Star is Born

· When Erik Killmonger reclaims the stolen African art from the British museum asking, “Do you think your ancestors paid a fair price?” in Black Panther

· When Miles Morales realizes his power and we get that upside-down shot in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

· When Zula tells Wiktor she spent the last night fucking his best friend just to get some emotion out of him, he hits her and she says, “Now we’re talking” in Cold War

· The bathroom fight scene in Mission Impossible — Fallout

· Tully saying, “You’ll do what you have to do. And then you’ll do it again” as the best piece of advice for just getting through the day in Tully

· The guy getting on the ferris wheel in Love, Simon

· When we first hear the white voice in Sorry to Bother You

· When Tom tells Will, “The same thing that’s wrong with you isn’t wrong with me,” in Leave No Trace

· The drive from one Chicago to the other in an unbroken 60 second shot in Widows

My quick thoughts on the Oscars

· I’m glad Spike Lee won an award. I thought him thanking his ancestors was powerful. I also thought BlacKKKlansman wasn’t any good. I joked during the ceremony that he just won for his 10th best movie. After looking at his fimography I think it’s actually 13th best. Still glad he won, but for something worse than He Got Game?

· Trevor Noah calling out Mel Gibson was my favorite moment that didn’t involve an actual winner. “Mel Gibson came up to me like, ‘Wakanda Forever’. He said another word after that but the Wakanda part was nice.” Reminder that Mel Gibson has been trash.

· Bradley Cooper sings like a guy singing Pearl Jam in the shower.

· I still don’t know the difference between a live action short and a TV show.

· It’s wild to me that the hottest hip-hop producer is also the hottest film composer who uses hip-hop and African influences and that it’s a Swedish dude that looks like this

· Green Book was not a good film. It wasn’t wildly offensive on the screen. It just wasn’t serious or meaningful. It was a fine little made-for-TV movie like those you’d see in the 80s to tell us racism is bad. But the off-screen stuff makes it a real problem. I hired a guy to redo my kitchen five years ago. He was at the house every day for a month. We talked quite a bit. I know him. He knows me. We’re not friends, but he was hired to do a job that he did very well and we were quite cordial. If his son made a movie 50 years from now saying that we were really good friends and that he changed my life and that I removed myself from black culture and he brought me back to it, that wouldn’t be ok. If, when my family said that’s not the way it was and that I’ve been mischaracterized, if his son said that we were liars and that only he knows the real truth that wouldn’t be ok. That’s Green Book. The son of a guy said he wrote a script based on the stories his dad told and that it’s now the official statement of record. I’m ok with white people telling black stories. I would have liked a woman to make The Color Purple, but it’s still a good movie in Spielberg’s hands. I’m not ok with anyone changing the truth about a person. And the fact that that account was still sub-par and was still rewarded is bizarre.

· Green Book was still a better movie than Bohemian Rhapsody. Queen is great. Queen music is fun and catchy. You have big rock. You have opera. You have showtunes. You have pop. You have funk. You have disco. They did it all and did it well. Every member of Queen was fantastic. No drummer covering up for an average bass player like you see in some bands. They’re all great musicians. This movie was a mess. There wasn’t real momentum in the story. It darted around. People disappeared, spoke lines offscreen despite not being in the scene and then disappeared again. The Hollywood chatter is that the editing award is because the guild knew the mess that was left to that team and wanted to reward the work they did putting something on screen. One director was fired. Another joined. They tried to put those two together and fill in with some other scenes shot later. Much of it looks like it was spliced from different times. It’s not a bad story. I would love to watch a movie about a young, queer South Asian kid in the UK becoming a star despite those two factors. I’d love to watch a movie about one of the more talented bands we’ve seen. I don’t want to watch this movie about either. And you know those performances that elevate a story? Where someone really captures the essence of a person and makes you feel something? Where they transform themselves so fully you’re lost in the story? Rami Malek’s performance was the opposite of that. Even the best actor clip they used at the awards was him lip-syncing by bugging out his eyes.

The movies I thought got too much love this year, or “OVERRATED (clap, clap, clapclapclap)

· Bohemian Rhapsody

· Green Book

· BlacKKKlansman

· Incredibles 2

· Deadpool 2

· The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (A bunch of TV shows, not a movie)

· Bandersnatch (A video game, not a movie)

· The Hate U Give

· Bird Box (though I’m not sure if people thought it was good or it was just on when people were on Christmas break)

· Won’t You Be My Neighbor

The movies that didn’t get enough love

· Tully

· Leave No Trace

· A Simple Favor

· Widows

· The Rider

· Boy Erased

My top 10 movies this year

· Black Panther (Working within the Marvel confines telling stories about characters that already exist we got pan-Africanism and Afro-Futurism at the same damn time)

· Mission Impossible — Fallout (The stunts are great as they always are. But this is a fast-paced, fun, action-packed adventure with a great bad guy. It says something when the helicopter chase scene at the end is the 3rd best action sequence)

· Minding the Gap (It takes skateboarding and turns it into a conversation about violence, abuse and the cycles of pain we put each other through. All told by the people themselves in a place, Rockford, IL, that we never see on screen)

· Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (It was funny. It was fun. It was dramatic. The stakes were real. But it was also about an Afro-Latino kid in NY learning his place in the world, or worlds.)

· Cold War (A romance about two people who should stay the hell away from each other. They hurt each other while yearning for each other. It’s beautiful and painful and scary and hilarious)

· Roma (The best film I saw in 2018. A reckoning about a upper-class kid and the women who nurtured him. A look at Mexico City in 1971 and the political strife that affected so many told through the eyes of one woman)

· Widows (Made to win awards I have no idea how it didn’t get recognition. The three best supporting performances I saw in 2018 were Rachel Weisz in The Favourite and Elizabeth Debicki and Cynthia Erivo in Widows. When Viola Davis doesn’t give the best performance in a movie you know you’re seeing something special. I know it was originally set in the UK, but there’s only one place in America this story could be told. This movie is Chicago AF)

· The Rider (It’s beautiful to watch. It makes South Dakota look like a vast, open version of heaven. It’s a true story told by the people who lived it. Like Minding the Gap, it’s a community you don’t see on screen, the Lakota Sioux of the Pine Ridge Reservation. We don’t see them in the past. We see them today doing what they can to make ends meet and facing the challenges of life)

· Tully (The 1st hour of Tully is the best of the year. The end is worth discussing, but this ain’t for spoilers. Postpartum depression is awful and this is the best I’ve seen that put on screen)

· Love, Simon (I’m a sucker for romance. I’m a sucker for high-school movies. This was really well done and made for me. I didn’t cheer so hard for one person to find love as I did in this one)

My bottom 10 movies this year, in no particular order

· Bohemian Rhapsody (See above)

· Death Wish (gun porn)

· Mile 22 (can anybody explain to me what’s happening in this movie other than shooting?)

· Peter Rabbit (where I had to explain to my kids that poising people with food allergies isn’t silly fun)

· Night School (I made it one hour in and didn’t even chuckle once. Maybe the ending was great. I didn’t make it)

· Solo: A Star Wars Story (Han Solo was the cool, tough guy. In this he’s an annoying little prick and now I have to rethink the character. It’s so bad it makes the other Star Wars movies worse)

· Tag (What a stupid concept. They play tag with each other to keep in touch. Yup. Based on a true story. It damn well better be. It’s way too stupid to be an original idea)

· The Legacy of a Whitetail Deer Hunter (I didn’t think Josh Brolin could be bad. This thing is bad. I wanted the kid to accidentally shoot them to make the movie end. He didn’t)

· Traffik (It was hilarious. It wasn’t supposed to be. My favorite part was the based on a true story tag when the true story was that there is sex trafficking. That was it.)

· White Boy Rick (A movie about drug dealing in the 1980s in Detroit? About White Boy Rick, a local legend? You would have to royally screw this up for it not to work for me. They did)

I saw 144 movies last year. It was at least 30 too many.

Thanks for reading.