2023 in Cinema

“So, the MCU is going to continue to lose its way in 2023… and it’s still going to be the most coherent superhero universe at the cinema?”

In 2023, the film industry looked forward to a year without pandemics and mass theatre closures for the first time since 2019. Then, in May, the Writers’ Guild of America went on strike over, among other predatory industry practices, the use of outdated theatrically-led models for streaming residuals and the threat of generative AI replacing human writers (because if generative AI can’t yet match human creativity at its best, it can certainly aspire to the level of a Hollywood writer on a shoestring salary and unrealistic deadlines.) The writers were joined in July by SAG-AFTRA, with the result that most of the summer tentpoles were not publicised by their stars, leading to a disappointing summer box office (with two significant exceptions, thanks to the phenomenon known as Barbieheimer.)

The juggernaut of the MCU continued to deny all logic and ploughed through on the strength of one really strong showing (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3; another of the year’s movies, The Marvels, was also pretty good, but got hammered by the strikes and the usual review bombing of any female led superhero movie.) Moving into Phase 5, the franchise still feels lost in the wake of the Infinity Saga, with the Multiverse Saga lacking focus and, indeed, a lead villain, with Jonathan Majors’ domestic violence conviction moving his status from quietly sidelined to persona non grata mere weeks after his run in Loki Season 2 wrapped up. Honestly, the MCU would have been in more trouble if DC had put up a credible opposition, but The Flash ended the DCEU on a whimper, leaving Blue Beetle (also under-publicised due to the strikes) in a sort of weird limbo.

A Look Ahead to 2022

So, this is daring of me, to assume I’ll be able to make a respectable number of films in 2022; enough to have to plan ahead even. This list is just based on what is currently scheduled to be on at the local cinema and has caught my eye, and honestly the main thing to take away from it is how normal it is. Clearly the industry has decided that this year they can take a solid chance on not losing weeks and weeks to Covid flare ups and lockdowns, which means this is going to be a serious test of that model.

21 pick up

Screw it, I’m done with the jokes about how movie scenes all ignore social distancing guidelines.

So, there are a few I want to try to catch up on after Omicron (that’s the Omicron variant, a particularly virulent strain of Covid-19) shut the office again and I didn’t manage to see anything in the last week or so before Christmas:

• West Side Story – Spielberg’s take on Bernstein and Sondheim’s take on Shakespeare’s take on da Porto’s take on Salernitano’s tragedy of Romeo and Juliet took a real beating at the box office, probably in part because of Omicron. I almost certainly won’t manage to see this one at the cinema, so it could be a while.
• The Matrix Resurrections – Similarly, I wasn’t able to get to see Lana Wachowski’s return to the world of The Matrix. I might be able to catch the tail end of its cinema time, depending on how it does overall and what shows up to replace it.

2021 in (and out of) Cinema

2020 really took a toll, eh?

So… How’s it going?

After 2020, the future of cinema was basically in serious question. Certainly in the UK the government policy of pretending that everything was fine as long as no-one who went to Eton was sick meant that everything closed again immediately after Christmas. Release dates were in flux, so I don’t even have my usual ‘what I planned to see’ post to compare to this here annual round up. I saw basically nothing new in January or February, as the studios held onto their releases in anticipation of theatres reopening.

Once things got going, cinemas began to open in a socially distanced way, and the crowds were fairly sparse, which suits me much better than it does the cinemas. There were also a lot of simultaneous or rapid releases to streaming services, especially Disney+, including premium releases with additional fees and the controversy of Black Widow‘s split release. Then the government policy of basically feeding anyone who can’t afford a chauffeur into the meat grinder saw public transport fill up and cinemas cramming more and more people in. Finally, the Omicron variant came along in the latter part of the year to mess with us again and I imagine (hope) we’ll have another pretty meagre January.

A Look Ahead at 2020

2019 is done and dusted; viewed, reviewed and rounded-up. Now it is time to look ahead to 2020.

I mean… There’s an impressive volume of leftfield options this year.

Once more, I will be looking at the major releases upcoming in each month – they say – and pondering on what I expect from them, which ones I want to see, and how I might resolve potential clashes.

A Look Ahead at 2019

With the last of 2018’s crop now viewed and reviewed, it’s time to look ahead and think about what’s coming up in 2019. This is my month by month plan of action for cinema in 2019; assuming that Brexit doesn’t reduce the country to a trashfire with no international distribution details, clean water or Italian cheeses.

“This is what was called a ‘camera’ in the before times.”

2018 in Cinema

And so, as another year comes to an end, it’s time to reflect on a busy year of cinema. In January, I laid out my plans for the films I wanted to see this year. Which did I see? Which did I miss? Which did I not see because they were rescheduled for 2019? Which did I miss because I chickened out of seeing horror at the cinema?

I’m going to break this down by genre, rather than by month. I’ll quote each film’s original score on the BMM, although as ever my increasingly antiquated, utterly subjective and just a little bit arbitrary scoring system does not necessarily match up with what I actually liked.

“So… much… cinema!”

Must See Movies Before You Grow Up

Must See Movies Before You Grow Up was a list compiled by Into Film, a charity devoted to the use of film in children’s education. The list – no longer present in its original form – was as follows:

• 101 Dalmatians (1961)
• A Little Princess (1995)
• Annie (1982)*
• Babe (1995)
• Beauty and the Beast (1991)*
• Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009)*
• Coraline (2009)
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid (2010)
• Dumbo (1941)
• ET: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)*
• Fantastic Mr Fox (2009)
• Free Willy (1993)
• Frozen (2013)*
• Home (2015)*
• Hook (1991)*
• Hotel Transylvania (2012)*
• How to Train Your Dragon (2010)*
• Jumanji (1995)*
• Kubo and the Two Strings (2016)*
• Mary Poppins (1964)*
• Matilda (1996)*
• Nanny McPhee (2005)*
• Night at the Museum (2006)
• Oliver! (1968)*
• Paddington (2014)
• Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015)*
• Shrek (2001)*
• Space Jam (1996)
• Spirited Away (2001)
• Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977)*
• Swallows and Amazons (2016)
• The Adventures of Tintin (2011)*
• The BFG (2016)
• The Gruffalo (2009)*
• The Iron Giant (1999)*
• The Jungle Book (1967)*
• The LEGO Movie (2014)*
• The Lion King (1994)*
• The Lorax (2012)
• The Never-Ending Story (1984)*
• The Princess Bride (1987)*
• The Secret Garden (1993)
• The Secret Life of Pets (2016)
• The Witches (1990)*
• Toy Story (1995)*
• Trolls (2016)
• Up (2009)*
• Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)*
• Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory (1971)*
• Zootropolis (2016)*

But is this really the ultimate list of childhood movies?

Disclaimer: This is my own take on the matter and I make no pretense to some superior status of judgement. Full disclosure, those films marked with an asterisk are the ones that I have seen an which I will be discussing most closely.

My Life in Movies

 

This is the meme: What is your favourite movie for each year of your life?

Well, it’s tough enough to narrow each year down to a selection, let alone a single movie, but I felt like I ought to give it a go. Below then, I consider this question and come up with answers, some reasons for those answers, and some also rans, for each of my forty years. To be clear, I’m not making quality judgements; this is about my historical and ongoing enjoyment of the movie, not how good it is. Therefore I am only looking at films that I’ve seen, and believe me there are some shocking gaps in that subset. Even in that limited space I’m not saying these are the best movies, but they are the ones I’ve had most fun with, for one reason or another.

“If this is a best of list then where is Citizen Kane?”

The Summer of Lovecraft: What Have We Learned?

HPL! HPL! Is the source of all our pain!

Well, it’s been over a month and we’ve finally come to the end of the Summer of Lovecraft! We’ve watched a lot of Lovecraft adaptations (and a few that weren’t actually Lovecraft adaptations at all) and what have we learned from the experience?

1. There are a lot of shitty Lovecraft adaptations out there.
   Okay; you may say this isn’t news, but damn there are a lot of these things. The appeal to filmmakers seems to be endless, despite the fact that 80-90% of the finished products are complete dingus.
2. The best of the bunch are the ones that can fit into another genre.
   Those adaptations that make decent films are basically those based on the stories that can most easily be turned into a story in an extant film genre (Herbert West: Re-Animator and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,) because pretty much all of the adaptations do this. As we noted at the start, Lovecraft is not a very cinematic writer, so with very few exceptions (Cool Air) to make a film the writers and directors have to put the essentials of the plot into a gothic horror, slasher, splatter movie or contemporary horror, along with liberal helpings of gore, jump-scares and boobies.
3. New interpretations work.
   When Lovecraft inspires people to go in new directions, that’s pretty cool — whether that’s the over-the-top horror-comedy of Re-Animator or the introspective examination of outsider-ness of Cthulhu. Heaven forbid that we only get story-accurate retellings for ever and ever. One or two are nice, though.
4. “Lovecraftian” is a very elastic term.
   Some horror fans use “Lovecraftian” as a sort of generic compliment — any reasonably intelligent horror movie is Lovecraftian, no matter how unrelated to Lovecraft’s work. For others, it just means tentacles. For others, it just seems to mean … I don’t know what. If you can associate the name with something like “Whispers,” it can mean anything.
5. Lovecraftian fiction is contemporary fiction.
   Stuart Gordon is insistent on setting his adaptations in the modern day, as do many others, because Lovecraft wasn’t writing period fiction. Given the misanthropy of many of his protagonists, even the manners of the age have little impact, and the horror of most of his pieces lies in the here and nowness of the setting, the conflict of ancient and modern, familiar and alien (be that literally alien or just newfangled,) and that loses something when the setting isn’t here and now.

It’s been a blast, and sometimes a chore. I’m looking forward to our next project, to be announced… soonish. Until then, there will still be our regular views. Happy reading, happy watching!

An Age of Marvels

Following on from my Ant-Man review and ‘Marvel Needs Women‘, I am planning post-Summer of Lovecraft to do a season of Marvel Cinematic Universe reviews. Before that, however, I thought I might as well do the almost obligatory ‘ranking the MCU’ post.