Hiiiiiiiiiiiiii!
This year's awesome gif co-host:
April Ludgate, played by
Aubrey Plaza (and sometimes it's just straight up Aubrey Plaza), who I
dearly love.
Without any additional superfluous ado!
The PsychoCinematic Year in Movies
2018 Edition
1. A Gray State (5)
2. Jim & Andy (4)
3. The Post (2.5)
4. Manolo: The Boy Who Made Shoes for Lizards (3)
5. Freeway: Crack in the System (5)
6. The Square (5)
8. Colossal (2)
9. Seeing Allred (5)
11. What Happened, Miss Simone? (5)
12. Icarus (5)
13. Leaning Into the Wind: Andy Goldsworthy (3.5)
14. A Wrinkle In Time (2)
15. Take Your Pills (3.5)
19. Avengers: Infinity War (4)
20. Who Took Johnny (5)
22. Before the Flood (4)
23. Abacus: Small Enough to Jail (5)
24. RBG (5)
25. Solo: A Star Wars Story (3)
26. Ocean's Eight (3)
27. Deadpool 2 (4)
28. Game Night (3)
30. Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (5)
31. Ant-Man and the Wasp (2.5)
32. Three Identical Strangers (4)
33. Blockers (3.5)
35. Dark Money (3)
36. BlackKklansman (3.5)
37. The Spy Who Dumped Me (3.5)
38. Crazy Rich Asians (3)
43. Venom (3)
44. Voices of Baltimore: Life Under Segregation (4)
45. A Star Is Born (4.5)
46. Tag (1.5)
47. Colette (4)
49. The Hate U Give (5)
50. Bohemian Rhapsody (4)
51. City 40 (4)
53. The Favourite (4.5)
54. Dallas Buyers Club (5)
55. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2.5)
56. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (3.5)
57. Get Him to the Greek (2)
Yet again: 5 extra movies!
With the exception, oddly, of November, I was again able to keep up a pretty consistent movie-watching habit throughout the year. I also struck a decent balance between watching movies through streamable services and seeming movies in theaters. All happiness-inducing and wellness-maintaining things!
Let's start with this year's least favorite movies:
For being a movie ostensibly meant to uplift its female protagonist but instead
portraying her as ineffective, dependent, and impulsive,
and also being so slow at one point I fell asleep:
The Post (2017)
For being an interesting concept that got weirdly and unpleasantly dark
without really seeming to understand just how dark it was...?:
Colossal (2016)
For perplexingly rewriting a beloved children's book,
being so poorly edited it is bizarre,
and for making me so nauseated I ultimately had to leave the theater:
A Wrinkle In Time (2018)
For being, as aforementioned, so aggressively "okay":
For being an affront to all that is good in filmmaking, or
for stoking my neverending hatred:
For an unbelievable, melodramatic, and poorly-delivered plot:
For being unsurprisingly dumb and lifeless, but still, and
Tag (2018)
and for trying to convince me that Jonah Hill's character isn't kind of terrible:
Get Him to the Greek (2010)
Fortunately/unfortunately, this is a denser field of contenders than last year. To be fair, I knew that several of the mediocre comedies I watched this year would be mediocre, and in fact watched them for that cohort of film's perhaps dubious yet still very real virtue: sometimes I just want to add to my list of movies for the year without having to be super emotionally or intellectually invested in a film. If I'm tired from a busy week and want to vegetate in front of my television while attaining a teeny feeling of accomplishment (one more movie yayyyyy), these movies fit the bill. So it feels unfair to tap them for Worst Movie of the Year.
Although I gave it a begrudging 2.5, which would normally exclude it for consideration for Worst Movie, I clearly have a lot of beef with "The Post." Katharine Graham had a pretty incredible life, yet the movie blatantly missed many opportunities for highlighting the things she overcame and accomplished. However, there were enough redeeming elements to the film that I don't think I can call it the worst thing I saw last year.
Really, there's no other obvious choice for the Worst Movie of the Year:
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)
That God. Damn. Movie.
Truly the worst, and most enraging, movie I saw in 2018.
Moving along to: this year's best movies!
A Gray State (2017)
Freeway: Crack in the System (2015)
The Square (2017)
Seeing Allred (2018)
What Happened, Miss Simone? (2015)
Icarus (2017)
Who Took Johnny (2014)
Abacus: Small Enough to Jail (2016)
RBG (2018)
Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (2018)
The Hate U Give (2018)
Dallas Buyers Club (2013)
A large majority of this list is comprised of documentaries. Like
last year, many of those documentaries are true-crime related, and unlike last year, they are less murder-y and more focused on other types of crime: "Freeway: A Crack in the System" focuses on the global drug trade and lethal national drug policy, "Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press" looks at terrifying attacks on the fifth estate, and "Abacus: Small Enough to Jail" examines the prosecution of a small Queens-based bank accused of fraudulent lending practices. No spoilers, but "Who Took Johnny" also fits in this category of true-crime but not murder-y true-crime. In another streak of celebrating lady badassery, "Seeing Allred", "What Happened, Miss Simone?", and "RBG" all celebrate and humanize bold, principled, brave, and controversial women.
As a little counterpoint to all this documentary darkness, "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" was a wonderful follow-up to the grand parade of Antidotes to Toxic Masculinity That We All Knew We Needed but Nevertheless Made Me Cry a Whole Bunch that
"Kedi" (2017) led last year.
Stepping away from this year's documentary contenders, "The Hate U Give" adapts
author Angie Thomas's excellent debut novel exploring a Black girl's experience of police brutality, code switching, and finding her courage, voice, and identity. Even though I had read the book, the movie still hits with impressive emotional strength and is a welcome entry in movies intended in large part for a teenaged and young adult audience.
"The Square" was a bizarre, entertaining, zig-zagging and, I worry, overlooked film that I really enjoyed. I found myself thinking about it a lot afterward, and not only because it's got the funniest and oddest (and to be fair maybe only?) power struggle over a condom I've ever seen.
So here's the thing: I'm fighting the urge to apologize for how obvious my choice of favorite movie is this year. But my job isn't to do a flashy, shocking reveal; it's just to reflect with as clear eyes as possible on the year of films and choose the movie that most moved and stuck with me. With that standard, the choice is quite simple.
I've written a few times this year about
movies I'm glad were made. There can be so much unnecessary, empty, and thoughtless mediocrity in media (and in the world) that I am deeply grateful for people who have the integrity and courage to make something weird or new. Several people have claimed that
my choice of favorite movie isn't doing anything special; it's
just another superhero movie.
But I call bullshit on that claim. It would be easy to dismiss this film as "just another superhero movie" if one chose not to take into account how much representation matters, especially in a genre of movies densely dominated by white male protagonists. It would be easy to call it "just another superhero movie" if one chose to ignore the film's examination of systemic racism or its creation of an intentionally empowering and fantastic heritage for Black children. And stepping back from the fact that this is an admirable, thrilling, and well-executed film, it's exciting to reflect on its
record-breaking debut and
impressive box office earnings signal, happily, that we can anticipate many more movies like this one.
My favorite movie of 2018 is:
Looking forward to sharing a 2019 filled with excellent movies with you, dear friends.
{Heart}
