IanTheCool
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Post by IanTheCool on Feb 25, 2024 10:10:51 GMT -5
forgot this one  |
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PhantomKnight
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Post by PhantomKnight on Feb 25, 2024 14:03:35 GMT -5
Good pick with American Fiction.
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Feb 26, 2024 7:57:09 GMT -5
Most Under-AppreciatedMy exact criteria for the most under-appreciated film has been kind of inconsistent over the years and often kind of tailors itself to the various trends that have been occurring in the years in question. For 2023 I’m mostly focusing on how inept distributors have been at marketing world cinema outside of awards season, how indies have been kicked to the curb, and how unfair media narratives can cloud the reputations of bigger movies too. Afire: Between his last film Undine and his new film Afire it’s pretty clear that Christian Petzold has begun a cycle of films themed around the classical elements which could be his version of the Three Colors Trilogy or the Six Moral Tales… but good luck getting anyone to care because the art house world seems to just go to sleep when faced with something that isn’t overtly flashy and isn’t going for Oscar gold. That’s a shame because this movie is one of the more vivid depictions of extreme introversion put to film and is also one of several movies this year to sensitively depict the fragile egos of authors.
The Eight Mountains: The Eight Mountains is an example of the very annoying phenomenon of movies getting caught between years. The movie won the Jury Prize at Cannes in the summer of 2022, which was the year it got its release in much of Europe, but Janus didn’t bother to get it into North American theaters until the May of the next year, at which point it seemed like old news to most critics. Granted it at least did get an American release that places it firmly in the year 2023 which is preferable to releases that get a non-release in December only to not get seen by anyone until the next year, but it’s still kind of an unpleasant purgatory.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny: So, obviously this feels like quite the odd man out given that it’s a $300 million dollar attempted blockbuster sitting next to four movies that barely got distribution, but this represents a very different strain of under-appreciation that I noticed this year, namely this strange tendency by people who haven’t even a movie to just go along with and exaggerate a narrative about a movie even if it’s unfair in a way that feels like an uninformed pile on (see also, The Marvels). Don’t get me wrong, I think this movie does have flaws and rarely rises above the level of “decent fun” but they’re not as extreme as some people make it out to be and aren’t that different from what a lot of more successful blockbusters suffer from. It’s really just the hyperbole I object to.
Monster: Hirokazu Kore-eda is perhaps a bit too prolific and consistent for his own good as it becomes kind of hard to get excited for more work from the guy when he seemingly puts out a new banger every year. That might have hurt Monster in terms of the U.S. box office but the film also seemed to have been something of a victim of the massive success of other works of Japanese cinema this year, namely the box office success of Godzilla Minus One and The Boy and the Heron and on the more art house level he missed out on being the Academy submission to Perfect Days. Between all that he never really had a marketing hook and got completely overshadowed in the media narratives.
A Thousand and One: Note also that movies in the English language are not exempt from underselling and poor distribution either as can be seen from the example of A Thousand and One, a movie which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance only to then be dropped into theaters two months later with limited marketing while also seeing the critics who praised it at the festival asleep at the wheel in terms of getting people to actually show up and see it. Oddly enough this actually did make a little more money than you might think, it stands at $3.5 million which is about as much as Anatomy of a Fall has made domestically, and yet it still feels like a non-entity in the culture because no one knows how to talk about indie cinema in the spring. And the Golden Stake goes to…The Eight MountainsIt’s a little hard to gauge how much a movie like this can be called “underappreciated” given that it did win a major award at Cannes and seems to have gotten a decent enough box office run in Europe for what it is but I don’t think it really got its due upon release and has been invisible during the year end award/top ten season. That’s unfortunate because this is a movie that I think a decently wide audience could appreciate, it doesn’t play like a Hollywood movie or anything but it’s also not some impenetrable art film, it’s a strong character study well told that I think a lot of people would like if directed towards it.
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PG Cooper
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Post by PG Cooper on Feb 26, 2024 8:14:09 GMT -5
Great pick. I certainly liked it when you directed me towards it.
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PhantomKnight
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Post by PhantomKnight on Feb 26, 2024 11:40:33 GMT -5
Never even heard of it, which I suppose gets to the point here.
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Feb 27, 2024 6:02:11 GMT -5
Best Action FilmYou know, it didn’t feel like it while it was happening but this has proven to be something of a landmark year for the action movie. You look at my nominee slates in the previous years these last couple decades have been wildly diluted by superhero movies while more conventional action movies have been hard to come by, but this year more straightforward actioneers were there for the finding and held their own. Couple notes: while there’s some action and spectacle in it I’ve judged that Godzilla Minus One is not really driven by action and doesn’t quite work here and while it has some good action in it I don’t think that’s the real appeal of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 either. Extraction 2: I’m a little conflicted on this one as I think these Extraction movies are pretty bland movies with a nothing of a hero at the center of them and skeletal stories… but man, they really come alive during those actions scenes. Directed by stunt coordinator Sam Hargrave, these movies pick up on the breakthroughs of the John Wick franchise and puts them into a more military environment, usually to solid results. There are just too many stand-out action scenes in this thing for it to be denied in this category, but I really wish they’d found a better vessel for them.
John Wick: Chapter 4: Though the core action style has pretty much been there from the beginning, the John Wick movies have actually changed quite a bit, in part because their budgets got bigger and bigger and with them they’ve gotten increasingly opulent and operatic in the execution and it really reaches a crescendo with this fourth installments. The world it inhabits is still kind of ridiculous but here it’s almost sublimely ridiculous and while a lot about this movie could be called indulgent it mostly gets away with it just because, well, it has the action scenes to back it up. The fights in Osaka and Paris are among the most epic action scenes brought to film.
The Killer: I might be stretching the definition of action movies slightly with this one, at least when compared to the other four nominees as this is maybe more of an assassination procedural than a real shoot-em-up but I think there’s enough conventional action here for it to fit. The film opens on this stylish sniper sequence which is slow right until things go belly up and it suddenly becomes a tense chase sequence and later of course we get that standout fight sequences. And even when punches aren’t being thrown and bullets aren’t being fired there’s still a sort of action movie intensity here that will leave action fans satisfied.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One: In 2018 the stars finally aligned to allow Mission: Impossible – Fallout to win in this category, the first of the series to do so and I might argue that they actually topped themselves in a lot of ways for this follow-up. Here we get a potentially more interesting villain in “the entity” and some standout set-pieces including the big amazing train crash and also a very well done car chase in Rome and a very fun cat and mouse chase through an airport in Abu Dhabi. In short it’s kind of everything Tom Cruise and company have led you to expect from this franchise and yet they’ve managed to turn up the heat even a little more.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse: There were a lot of superhero movies this year and a lot of them weren’t great. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse was hardly the most action oriented of the year’s offerings in the genre and yet it still rises above most of them just by dent of operating on another level from most of them on all levels. From the fight with the Renaissance Vulture to the fight with The Spot to the scuffle in Mumbattan to the Chase scene through the Spider-Man 2099’s futuristic city scape the film completely delivers whenever it goes into action mode even if that isn’t really the point. And the Golden Stake goes to…John Wick: Chapter 4Looked at as a movie in total I definitely think Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is better than this and The Killer would also probably outpace it in an overall ranking, but looked at in the context of the action movie of the year… yeah John Wick: Chapter 4 needs to win that. You just have to look at fellow nominee Extraction 2 to see how much influence this franchise has had over the years and the fact that the series has mostly only gotten better over the course of its run with this as its clear high point is also a testament to how much well managed the series has been. Moment for moment it’s the most and best action bang for your buck.
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PG Cooper
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Post by PG Cooper on Feb 27, 2024 7:25:37 GMT -5
Hell yeah. Accept no substitute.
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PhantomKnight
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Post by PhantomKnight on Feb 27, 2024 11:42:45 GMT -5
Indeed. The right choice.
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PG Cooper
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Post by PG Cooper on Feb 27, 2024 11:44:33 GMT -5
I'm also happy to see The Killer get a nomination here. Not the obvious choice but it more than deserves recognition for action filmmaking.
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donny
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Post by donny on Feb 27, 2024 12:40:08 GMT -5
The King.
Been a great 10 years for Wick/Mission Impossible.
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Feb 28, 2024 7:24:44 GMT -5
Best ComedyThis has been a very strange year for comedy. On one hand mainstream studio comedy is as dead as ever (with one notable exception) and yet I still feel like I’m able to cram this category with movie and better movies than ever despite the fact that a lot of the movies here arguably need an asterisk next to their genre classification. In some ways the genre eligibility decisions here had more of an affect on the lineup than the quality decisions. In particular, I decided I don’t really think of The Holdovers as a comedy though an argument for that could certainly be made. Also, while I think that there’s more than enough absurdism in Beau is Afraid to argue for it being a comedy… it still just didn’t feel right next to the other five here so I left it out to make room. American Fiction: American Fiction is actually in some ways less of a comedy than its trailers would have you think it is as large portions are actually about the Jeffrey Wright character’s dysfunctional family, but the elements of societal satire that you expect are certainly still in there as well. The film is interested in pointing out some of the absurdities inherent in the at times condescending ways that intellectuals engage in discourse around black literature and the pressure black creators feel to conform to other people’s ideas of who they are. It’s a comedy that’s willing to go some time without laughs but when they do go for them they tend to be big ones.
Asteroid City: Wes Anderson has pretty much always made comedies but they’re comedies that almost seem to inhabit a genre of their own. Asteroid City is probably on the more serious side of this spectrum what with its themes of grief and existential dread but it’s also a movie with a cameo by a stop-motion alien who awkwardly steals an asteroid and which is willing to break into a bluegrass song about said encounter. In fact there are probably more laughs here than you even remember but even more than with most of Anderson’s movies they come with that undercurrent of sadness that evens thing out.
Barbie: There’s been a lot of talk about the death of the mainstream studio comedy and on some level you can see that reflected in the nominees here… but the narrative is kind of challenged by the fact that the by far highest grossing movie of the year is pretty straightforwardly a comedy, although it kind of isn’t treated like one in “the discourse” even though there’s basically no other genre it can be placed in. Hell, Will Ferrell is in the damn thing. And the movie is pretty successful at what it’s trying to do, theaters around the world were filled with people learning to love laughter in the theater all over again.
Poor Things: More than anything else, what Yorgos Lanthimos brings to cinema is this really offbeat sense of humor that it’s hard to get from much of anyone else, at least with this level of success. In fact the humor is probably a big part of why Poor Things is as accessible as it is given that it otherwise has a potentially off-putting and unpalatable story but even people weirded out by that can appreciate the hilarity of Bella threatening to punch a baby… actually maybe the comedy is potentially off putting for some people as well, but not for me and that’s kind of the opinion that matters here.
You Hurt My Feelings: Though it’s not exactly trying to be a laugh-a-minute thing You Hurt My Feelings is still essentially a dry comedy that exists as light satire of the urban upper middle class it depicts and is kind of the movie holding fort for this particular brand of indie comedy of manners of the Woody Allen variety. It takes its central marital conflict pretty seriously despite the relatively low stakes but side elements like the husband’s therapy sessions or the Michaela Watkins characters struggles as an interior decorator do go for laughs and does so in a way that’s charming and unobtrusive. And the Golden Stake goes to…Poor ThingsI’ve long had to ponder whether this category was for the funniest movie or the best movie that’s a comedy. This year that’s in some ways a non-issue as I’d say the top three movies here got roughly equal number of laughs out of me despite none of them being quite the kinds of movies the category was invented to reward, so it was pretty easy to then just default to my favorite of the five, which was definitely Poor Things. Lanthimos won here previously for The Favourite and in some ways he’s actually topped himself here both comedically and in terms of general audatiousness and it’s quite the sight to behold.
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PG Cooper
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Post by PG Cooper on Feb 28, 2024 10:02:03 GMT -5
Excellent choice. I also wanna shoutout Quiz Lady, which is on Disney+ in Canada and Hulu in the U.S. Not a great movie by any stretch but a fun and breezy watch that scratched the itch of a standard studio comedy pretty well for me. It even has a scene where a character who doesn't do drugs accidentally gets really high. Comedy is back!
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PhantomKnight
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Post by PhantomKnight on Feb 28, 2024 10:57:40 GMT -5
Eh, would've gone either American Fiction or Barbie.
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Doomsday
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Post by Doomsday on Feb 28, 2024 12:32:20 GMT -5
Excellent choice. I also wanna shoutout Quiz Lady, which is on Disney+ in Canada and Hulu in the U.S. Not a great movie by any stretch but a fun and breezy watch that scratched the itch of a standard studio comedy pretty well for me. It even has a scene where a character who doesn't do drugs accidentally gets really high. Comedy is back! I always had this idea that I've wanted to work into a screenplay. It features a modest, traditional character who hasn't done drugs before but is very fond of pastries. This character (I imagine a mom or grandma) sees a stack of delicious looking brownies. But they aren't regular brownies, they're pot brownies! Then she eats some and things just go craaaaazy. I just need to find the right, most worthy script to plug it into. |
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Neverending
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Post by Neverending on Feb 28, 2024 12:43:28 GMT -5
Excellent choice. I also wanna shoutout Quiz Lady, which is on Disney+ in Canada and Hulu in the U.S. Not a great movie by any stretch but a fun and breezy watch that scratched the itch of a standard studio comedy pretty well for me. It even has a scene where a character who doesn't do drugs accidentally gets really high. Comedy is back! I always had this idea that I've wanted to work into a screenplay. It features a modest, traditional character who hasn't done drugs before but is very fond of pastries. This character (I imagine a mom or grandma) sees a stack of delicious looking brownies. But they aren't regular brownies, they're pot brownies! Then she eats some and things just go craaaaazy. I just need to find the right, most worthy script to plug it into. Baby Yoda has his first pot brownie. |
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Doomsday
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Post by Doomsday on Feb 28, 2024 12:46:15 GMT -5
I always had this idea that I've wanted to work into a screenplay. It features a modest, traditional character who hasn't done drugs before but is very fond of pastries. This character (I imagine a mom or grandma) sees a stack of delicious looking brownies. But they aren't regular brownies, they're pot brownies! Then she eats some and things just go craaaaazy. I just need to find the right, most worthy script to plug it into. Baby Yoda has his first pot brownie. OHH NOOOOOOOOO!!!1!! |
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Neverending
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Post by Neverending on Feb 28, 2024 12:50:47 GMT -5
Baby Yoda has his first pot brownie. OHH NOOOOOOOOO!!!1!! He gets it from the biker gang. |
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Doomsday
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Post by Doomsday on Feb 28, 2024 20:04:02 GMT -5
He gets it from the biker gang. Don't you dare mock Robert Rodriguez's masterpiece. |
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Feb 29, 2024 6:43:13 GMT -5
Best Horror FilmThis has been a pretty weird decade for horror. We’ve seen remnants of the torture porn of the early 2000s (Saw X), and the jump scare ghost movies of the late 2000s and early 2010s (Insidious: The Red Door), and the “elevated” horror of the late 2010s (It Lives Inside) but none of these felt like the future of the genre and it’s still not clear what the dominant trend of the 2020s is going to be so it perhaps feels fitting that the movies I came up with are kind of experimental exercises in horror that are feeling out new ideas. A note on classification: I decided that M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin is more of a thriller than a true horror movie and I also decided that Infinity Pool was really a very dark science fiction movie rather than a true work of horror. El Conde: Of the nominees here this one is probably the furthest from being a clear horror film as it’s using horror iconography for satirical ends rather than actually trying to scare you at all, but fuck it, it’s a movie about vampires so I’m nominating it here. The film posits, what if Augusto Pinochet was actually a vampire and he faked his death and is planning a comeback. The movie makes some smart adaptations of traditional vampire iconography and though it’s not trying to terrify it does engage in orthodox horror imagery in some pretty creative ways.
Enys Men: Enys Men (pronounced “ennis main”) is an experimental lo-fi horror flick that has perhaps been overshadowed a little by another one of the nominees here that’s in that lane but does have an identity all its own. Shot on 16mm, the film looks at a woman’s decent into madness while living on this island in Cornwall and possibly being haunted by the ghosts of the island’s previous inhabitants. It’s one part psychological horror, one part folk horror, and while it’s not literally a found footage movie, the film’s style almost invokes one. Really interesting piece of work. Evil Dead Rise: I feel like such a hipster nominating all these experimental horror movies that kind of confound genres, so here’s a bone thrown to the people who just want a traditional gore fest. I had some problems with this as it’s a movie that’s maybe a little too effective for its own good at endearing you to this family that it’s about to terrorize, but that’s hardly the worst thing your movie can have going for it. When the movie does cook it really cooks and manages to recapture the feel of those earlier Evil Dead movies without feeling like a complete retread.
Skinamarink: Skinamarink is probably the most prominent example to date of the sub-genre of “analog horror,” an aesthetic that’s heretofore been more associated with internet video than feature films, and which used the look of vintage video formats like VHS and mini-DV in order to bring the uncanny into the mundane. This movie is made to look more like it was shot on film but then transferred to VHS, but that’s one of the less strange things about it as it’s this largely non-narrative nightmare transcription in which a family seems to be terrorized by some sort of phantom in their home but it’s oblique about this and eschews traditional exposition entirely in favor of a hard commitment to tone.
Talk to Me: The whole “A24 horror” thing seems to be dying during the 2020s but the distributor has had enough gas in the tank to get at least one of their signature “elevated” horror movies each year and in some ways Talk to Me felt more like a return to form for them than most of their other offerings as of late. The film looks at a group of teenagers who start dabbling with the supernatural for thrills, not thinking through the consequences for such behavior and this of course doubles as an allegory for more real world risk taking by teenagers. And the Golden Stake goes to…SkinamarinkSkinamarink is like nothing else that’s ever won in this category… in fact it’s unlike anything that’s won much of anywhere before. This is a Michael Snow-esque minimalistic experimental movie that somehow managed to get something of an audience, albeit one made up of a particular kind of adventurous horror fan. It’s definitely not a movie for everyone but if you’re willing to submit to the experience it becomes an audio/video journey that will creep under your skin and unsettle you. In a year when this genre was a bit more confident I might have been less interested in going with something like this but in this year where we don’t know where horror cinema is going it felt right to go with the most adventurous option that I think will prove to be the most memorable of these options.
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PG Cooper
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Post by PG Cooper on Feb 29, 2024 7:20:31 GMT -5
We're eye to eye in the genre categories.
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PhantomKnight
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Post by PhantomKnight on Feb 29, 2024 9:10:05 GMT -5
Skiddymerrinkadink
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Feb 29, 2024 10:49:24 GMT -5
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PhantomKnight
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Post by PhantomKnight on Feb 29, 2024 11:18:16 GMT -5
Every time I read that title, my inner voice involuntarily says that.
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thebtskink
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Post by thebtskink on Feb 29, 2024 11:48:46 GMT -5
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thebtskink
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Post by thebtskink on Feb 29, 2024 11:50:08 GMT -5
Sharon Lois and Braham were Canada's worst export.
Saying a lot for the country that gave us Bryan Adams.
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