End of Year Eight

I set a movie goal for myself every year of watching 400 different movies. Last year, I averaged a movie per day. This year, I got a little closer, but fell just short, even with a huge push in the last couple of weeks to try to hit 400. Yesterday, I was at 392, meaning I needed another eight movies in two days. I made an effort, but I’m pretty much done at 398. Close, but no set of steak knives for yours truly. You can see what I watched this year here: Everything I've Watched in 2017. Of the 398 movies I watched this year, only 65 were rewatches, so 333 of them were new to me.

In many of my year-end posts, I have an announcement or two. I suppose I kind of do this year as well. The reality of my Oscar lists is that I have a mere 112 movies left not including 20 or so that will be added in a couple of weeks for the next round of Oscars. Since there are probably a good dozen and a half that I can’t locate no matter how much I try, it puts me at needing to review only 9 or 10 per month to finish. So, I guess that means that I’ll be completing those lists as far as I can in 2018.

Where do we go from there? Unknown, although the They Shoot Zombies, Don’t They? list has been calling me. And with several hundred more Oscar Got It Wrong! posts to go, I think we’ll be here for some time yet.

Let’s hope for a better 2018 than we had a 2017. Peace, prosperity, and good cinema to all.

The Heart Wants What the Heart Wants

Film: The Shape of Water
Format: Classic Cinemas Charlestowne 18.

I would be lying if I suggested that I didn’t have high hopes for The Shape of Water. I always have high hopes for anything touched by Guillermo del Toro, and that’s especially true when he’s sitting in the director’s chair. The Shape of Water is the film I’ve been waiting for since I saw the first trailer. The movie has been given a slow open, and now, about a good month after the film officially opened, the closest theater showing the movie is a good 45 minutes away. Still, I see all of del Toro’s movies in the theater, so it was only a matter of time before I went to see it.

I’m going to spill the beans a little here. The Shape of Water is good, even very good. It is as beautiful as any of del Toro’s films and perhaps quite a bit more beautiful than many of them. But it doesn’t quite rise to the level of great. There are moments that are as good as anything del Toro has ever done. But I guessed the ending, and the ending is something the film doesn’t quite earn.

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Original Screenplay 1946

The Contenders:

The Blue Dahlia
Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du Paradis)
Notorious
Road to Utopia
The Seventh Veil (winner)

Wednesday Horror: Train to Busan (Busanhaeng)

Film: Train to Busan (Busanhaeng)
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on laptop.

Zombie movies are popular and have been for years, but we’re getting better and better zombie movies these days. I find this fascinating. So often, a genre becomes tired and played out as more and more filmmakers dive in with their own versions of what quickly becomes standard and then cliché. Sure, there are plenty of bad zombie moves, but some filmmakers are exploring the ideas as real challenges and coming up with exciting films. Train to Busan (Busanhaeng in the Korean) is one of these films. However, the reason it is so interesting and worth seeing isn’t really about the ideas.

So let’s talk about that for a moment. A film like Warm Bodies took the genre and made a Romeo and Juliet-style romance out of zombies. Maggie was a contemplative film about family that just happened to have a zombie story attached to it. The Girl with All the Gifts, while technically not a zombie film, gives us a story from at least partially the point of view of the infected. Train to Busan does none of this. It is a straightforward zombie film that works for two reasons. First, it relies on the same speed of transmission of films like 28 Days Later. Second, it doesn’t stop.

Getting Away with Murder

Film: Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Indagine su un Cittadino al di Sopra di Ogni Sospetto)
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

Oscar hasn’t always known how to handle non-English movies. A case in point is Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Indagine su un Cittadino al di Sopra di Ogni Sospetto). This film won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for 1970, and then was nominated the next year for Best Original Screenplay for 1971. Evidently, according to Oscar, this film had two release years. Perhaps the Best Original Screenplay nominees for 1971 were so weak that they had to go hunting to fill the ranks. I suppose we’ll figure that out eventually.

Elio Petri’s film (he directed and co-wrote it) presents us with a story that needs to be taken in several different ways at the same time. On the surface, it’s a police procedural with an interesting twist—one that we’re aware of the whole time. It is simultaneously one of the most subversive films I have ever seen.

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Adapted Screenplay 2010

The Contenders:

127 Hours
The Social Network (winner)
Toy Story 3
True Grit
Winter’s Bone

Last Minute Shopping

In the past, I’ve traditionally added 10 movies to The List on Christmas, but this year, Christmas falls on an Oscar day, and Oscar posts always take precedence. Because of that, this year, we get to open our presents early, and I’m going to suggest 10 movies that I think deserve to be on the 1001 Movies list that have for some reason been ignored.

This isn’t an ordered list. Instead, it’s more or less in the order I thought of them.