Hi everyone,
It's time for our annual review of all the films I watched in the previous year! As always, I'm excited to share all the movies I watched over the year with you and uplift (or roast) the best and worst of the previous twelve months.
I'll note right away that I barely made it to my 52-movies-per-year goal, only cramming in enough films in the last few weeks of the year to make it past that benchmark. As always the reasons for something like that are complex, but probably the biggest explanation is that I spent most of 2022 pregnant with my now-very-soon-forthcoming Second Child.
While I have thankfully continued to be lucky in that my overall experience of pregnancy is pretty easy, as many pregnant parents of at least one child can attest, it is simply harder to be pregnant when you already have a kid, even in a best case scenario situation with an extremely supportive and actively involved partner like Husband. I also found that my experience of the first trimester this time was harder than in my previous pregnancy, with more intense fatigue and nausea that seemed to have also lasted a bit longer (or maybe just started earlier?). Thankfully a decent chunk of the second trimester and the majority of the third have been much easier, which also allowed me to catch up on movie-watching before 2022 concluded.
All that resulted in my having overall both less energy and tolerance for the commitment of feature-length entertainment for several months last year, especially for films I hadn't seen before. I've previously talked about how a variety of emotional and practical circumstances can impact a person's particular appetites for distraction, and while these are very happy circumstances that I have experienced on purpose and with loving enthusiasm, the outcome was generally the same: I watched fewer movies, and to some degree what I watched was either of lower quality or of aggressively, bankably higher quality because I didn't want to sign up for something that could be disappointing.
So with that preamble, I present to you:
The PsychoCinematic Year in Movies
2022 Edition
1. While You Were Sleeping (3.5)
2. The French Dispatch (5)
3. Single All the Way (4)
4. Venom 2: Let There Be Carnage (2)
5. The Power of the Dog (4)
6. Encanto (3)
7. The Mitchells vs The Machines (4.5)
8. 14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible (5)
9. Hearts of Darkness (4)
10. Meru (4)
11. The River Runner (2)
12. House of Gucci (2)
13. The Alpinist (5)
14. Spencer (4)
15. The Tinder Swindler (4)
16. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (4)
17. I Want You Back (3)
18. Red Rocket (2)
19. Free Guy (5)
20. Spider-Man: No Way Home (4)
21. Turning Red (2)
22. Kingsman: The Secret Service (4)
23. The Founder (4)
24. Vacation Friends (5)
25. Don’t Look Up (1)
26. Julia (5)
27. White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch (3.5)
28. Plan B (4)
29. The Valet (4.5)
30. Fire Island (4)
31. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (4)
32. Dancing with the Birds (5)
33. Hot Fuzz (3)***
34. Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates (4)
35. The Incredible Burt Wonderstone (1)
36. GoodFellas (4.5)***
37. Nope (3)
38. The Hangover Part II (2)***
39. Into the Inferno (4)
40. Bros (2)
41. Don’t Worry Darling (5)
42. The Book of Life (2)
43. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (2)
44. See How They Run (3)
45. The Wonder (4)
46. Bullet Train (4)
47. Persona: The Dark Truth Behind Personality Tests (3.5)
48. Four Christmases (1)
49. National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (2)
50. A Bad Moms Christmas (1)
51. Single All the Way (4.5)***
52. The Lost City (4)
53. A Hollywood Christmas (1)
54. Call Me Miss Cleo (3.5)
I suppose I should cut myself some slack, as I actually watched the exact same number of movies as I did in 2021. The noteworthy--and stressful--difference between 2022 and its predecessor is that I kept a consistent pace to stay on track in 2021, whereas this year I started pretty strong by being solidly halfway to my 52 movies goal in the first four months of the year before my viewership fell off a cliff with the beginning of my pregnancy. I allowed myself to coast for a bit because I knew I was ahead, only needing to hustle a bit to catch up once I had coasted for longer than I anticipated I would.
I'm not actually calculating this, but based on a perusal of my ratings between the last two years, it happily also looks like I watched more movies I enjoyed, with a rating of 4 or higher, than I did in the previous year. I imagine this is due in no small part to the (excrutiatingly) gradual amelioration of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the very positive circumstances that stepped in to impact my movie watching. The overall emotional state I was in while watching movies in 2021 was very different last year; this year I was tired or didn't feel well, but I wasn't feeling actively traumatized by a grinding and seemingly ceaseless world event. It's probably unsurprising that that impacted my responses to films and shows up in my overall more positive ratings in 2021. This is so heartening! I'm glad to have this opportunity to take stock of subtle changes in my movie watching in recent years.
And now, let's commence with the first of our two tasks tonight: identifying 2022's worst film.
Last year's worst offenders were:
(Well first of all, I clearly need to up the quality on the films included in the Christmas movie medley if I'm going to continue that new tradition.)
This really is a battle of which movie I actively hate most based on their respective impacts on their audiences. The two major contenders are "Don't Look Up" and "A Bad Moms Christmas".
The more obvious emotional assault of "Don't Look Up", with its combination of epic too-soonness and utter lack of sincere, laugh-prompting humor, still flabbergasts me, but it's the more banal yet devastating psychological warfare of "A Bad Moms Christmas" that perhaps troubles me more deeply. While "Bad Moms" is hardly the only movie hammering the message that it's a child's job to roll over in the face of supremely unhealthy, neglectful, critical, or even outright abusive parent behavior because family always comes first, it's a particularly egregious example of the blatant self-betrayal that messaging demands of people thrust into the position of deciding between their own wellbeing and the demands of their harmful family member.
As I alluded to in the Christmas movie medley, Mila Kunis's Amy is accused of ruining Christmas because she attempts to bar her mother from her family's Christmas celebration (gasp!!)--after her mother, Christine Baranski's Ruth, invades Amy's home, extensively redecorates it without Amy's permission, repeatedly gives Amy's children expensive gifts despite Amy's requests not to, and drags Amy's family through unpleasant holiday events that no one but Ruth is interested in, all the while compulsively and unabashedly peppering Amy with direct and indirect insults. Taken individually, none of these behaviors is okay. Taken all together, it's extremely obvious that a firm boundary is the only appropriate recourse left to Amy.
But still: the narrative this movie asserts is that Amy is the one who ruins Christmas by attempting to set that boundary, not Ruth via her relentless campaign of boundary violation, control, and verbal abuse. This moment is made even worse by the fact that Amy's children, who have witnessed much of their grandmother's harmful behavior toward their mother and who have largely enjoyed the ways in which Amy has tried to instate her family's own plans for the holiday, are nevertheless the ones who accuse Amy of ruining the holiday. The messaging to anyone in the audience is clear: If you set boundaries with horrendous family behavior for your own health and sanity, everyone will think you're a terrible person and no one will understand or respect your decision. Better to just absorb the maltreatment forever and model to he next generation that it's okay to mistreat family members if this film got its way, apparently?
So yeah, with all that explanation, the worst film I watched in 2022 was:
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| A Bad Moms Christmas (2017) |
No more movies like this, please! I would actually be FASCINATED to see silly ass holiday movies in which characters successfully set boundaries with bad family behavior and then rode happily into the festive sunset. What would that be like?
And now, onward to the year's highest rated movies!
Happily, unlike last year, there were so many movies that I rated a 5 that I don't feel the need to include the 4.5-rated films in this year's list of contenders. It's so nice that I watched so many movies I really liked last year! The movies with 5 ratings in 2022 were:
What a fun array of favorite films! I love that I saw some truly enjoyable and recently made comedies this year with "Free Guy" (2021; thoroughly confirming Ryan Reynolds as one of my favorite comedy stars) and "Vacation Friends" (2021), both of which make me really excited to see what the future of funny movies holds.
The year's highest rated adventure-based documentaries, "14 Peaks" (2021) and "The Alpinist" (2020) were beautifully made, expertly balancing gorgeous, austere, and remote terrain against the lovely, brave, vulnerable human beings at their center. The documentary "Julia" (2021) was both engrossing and impressive in its comprehensive dive into multiple facets of its famous titular chef.
I deeply enjoyed Wes Anderson's latest directorial offering in "The French Dispatch" (2021) and am still glad it was one of the first movies I watched last year; in many ways, doing that (at Husband's excellent suggestion) probably helped set the precedent for 2022 to be a year filled with more satisfying films.
I am still furious over the distracting bad press surrounding "Don't Worry Darling" (2022) and maintain that it is an excellent and hopefully not perpetually underrated or overlooked movie. It was exceedingly well made it pretty much every way and offers a subtle yet disturbingly incisive and timely new take on feminist horror.
Despite all these excellent contenders, I can't help but uplift perhaps the most humble-seeming entry: "Dancing with the Birds" (2019). My love for this movie is deeply personal, having watched it at a minimum dozens of times with my Child, sometimes more than once in a day, and watching him come to recognize each of the featured birds of paradise and even imitating some of their delightful dances. I found it to be exceedingly comforting and pleasant every time we watched it, which is an entirely remarkable feat given the high rotation it was in for several months. In fact, for some time this was the first and only thing we were comfortable with Child watching recurrently when we finally introduced television to him in 2022. This movie became so beloved in our home that it even inspired our family's Halloween costumes last year.
Perhaps the clearest endorsement for this movie is that despite watching it more times than I could count, the film's final dance, performed by a Carola's perotia, still moves me to tears every damn time. It's hard to fully articulate why, but to make my best attempt: It combines beautiful, intimate footage of a sweet, earnest little bird dancing his little heart out in the hopes of winning over a mate--displaying a craft of artful movement he has honed for his entire life--set to T. Rex's glam rocky "Cosmic Dancer" about dancing out of the womb, as a little child, and until the end of one's life, and I've now watched this over and over with my sweet little Child dancing along with that sweet little bird, and how could the precious, fleeting, poignant sweetness of those moments not bring me to my knees in tearful gratitude?
I am so thankful to this little documentary for giving me that gift over and over again. So of course, my favorite film of 2022 is:
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| Dancing with the Birds (2019) |
If you're interested, you can watch it on Netflix here!
I'm looking forward to many beautiful new things this year, and hopefully many beautiful new movies. I hope 2023 is an excellent year of joy and growth for all of us.
{Heart}
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