The end of each year is a relief, like the last stretch of a marathon, pushing ever harder, puffing our chests forward even, before hitting the finish line. Honestly, I can’t wait for 2019, but I suppose that a quick look back at the racetrack in retrospect is not a bad idea. Every competition offers its own delayed chance at self-improvement, yes?
Of course, I’m talking about movies despite that initial analogy. Movies are one of the greatest ways that art impacts people and culture, and I don’t always mean “great” to mean “better than good”. Mostly, it simply means that movies reach the masses in ways that books, paintings, even TV shows simply don’t. Although movies are less and less events that people make plans for, even dress up nice and plan a whole evening around, a movie is still a singular work of art and should be considered and appreciated as such.
Even crappy movies. Even popular movies. Even cheap movies. Actually, especially cheap movies. It’s not like the expensive ones really need one critic’s review to be successful or be proven otherwise. When an army of advertisers has a budget of tens of millions of dollars to overwhelm and inculcate an unwitting populace with the desire to see dreck like Batman v Superman that’s just big business. When you spend $300 million to make an overblown grandiose pile of cinematic excrement then you might as well spend $50 million to tell everybody how wonderful it is, right? You can fool a lot of the people most of the time, that’s what the studios have learned. It’s practically their credo.
We could talk about how the Top 10 grossing movies of the year had eight big-budget blockbuster movies of superheroes and/or sequels to colossal franchises. Movies like Ready Player One (directed by Steven Spielberg) and Bohemian Rhapsody are the odd men out, but the latter especially so as it’s a biopic of Freddie Mercury and has limited special effects, though I do consider Rami Malek’s moustache to be a special effect.
Now, some may argue that Freddie was a superhero in his own way with his outrageous persona, blistering stage presence and unmatched vocal abilities, but he was still a real man, not a fictional character from a comic book. Perhaps his alter ego should have had the name Mister Fahrenheit …
Readers might have noticed I have not been going to a lot of mainstream movies. Instead, I’ve been opting to pay more attention to first-run films that hit Metro Cinema. A movie naturally seems to offer more in terms of culture and respect when it plays at one of Edmonton’s grande dame moviehouses (Metro resides at the Garneau Theatre; the Princess Theatre is the other lady). The Metro programmers are also already eager to find films of import and higher quality. You need to go.
In the last 12 months, I’ve enjoyed quality documentaries and fictional pieces such as The Stairs, Loveless and Revenge, not to mention catching a handful of film festivals that have come through the Metro. My favourites of the bunch were the French film Revenge (by writer/director Coralie Fargeat) and Foxtrot, although the Russian Loveless was just as devastating as director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s previous drama Leviathan. Revenge and Foxtrot, I suspect, together cost less than one per cent of the budget for Robert Downey Jr.’s ego wrangler for Avengers: Infinity War.
Just as an aside since we’re on that little slice of wonder, I recently watched Infinity War and – surprise – would have given it a decent review. Not that I’d ever want to watch it again. Not that it was filled with riveting human performances. Not that I cared to understand the intricacies of such a complex soap opera plot. And certainly not that the set designs were Gone with the Wind worthy. It’s mostly that this Disney film (2018’s top grosser at more than $2 billion) has a main cast of dozens of major characters and name actors including such esteemed collaborators as William Hurt, Danai Gurira, Peter Dinklage and Kerry Condon. You might not know all of their names but you remember them every time you see them in a movie, even in bit roles. To fit all those people respectfully into such a colossal stage play is a feat of screenwriting, nothing more.
Hot trivia piece: Avengers: Infinity War and its upcoming sequel Avengers: Endgame (coming April 26, 2019), both had St. Albert-raised cinematographer Trent Opaloch behind the camera. Hometown kid sure made good right there. I’m still waiting for more of the results of the promise that District 9 offered though. “Where’s the story?” I ask the Russo Brothers, as they answer, “Ask Markus and McFeely,” passing the buck to the screenwriters, as always.
Side note to Avengers: it’s a Disney product just as three others on the list were. That megacorp also owns much of Marvel as well as Star Wars, Pixar and Winnie the Pooh. Just a year ago, it announced it would be buying 21st Century Fox, too. So I continue my wait for the day when I can watch a single movie where all of the Avengers, plus Deadpool, and the Incredibles, and the Rebel Alliance, plus Winnie the Pooh, have a battle royale with Thanos, and all of the evil forces of the Dark Side, including Donald Duck. The Donald is a horrendous jerk, I say.
As for the other contributors to that all-important Top 10, I missed out on Black Panther, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Incredibles 2, Venom, Bohemian Rhapsody, Ant-Man and the Wasp, and Fantastic Beasts: the Crimes of Grindelwald. I tried to watch Deadpool 2 because I enjoyed the first so much with its patchwork story editing and cheeky ethos towards breaking the fourth wall and such. DP2, however, was a major snoozer. I couldn’t get past minute 30. Not even the Christmas version of the film, recently released, tempts me to return to that cess. I did, however, force my concentration long enough to abide M:I-6. For all of Tom Cruise’s physical and psychological abilities to overcome, somehow he can’t or won’t try to take his “actual acting” to the limits of greatness. Could you imagine a day when he had more Oscars than Meryl Streep? No, neither can I, not even after the legalization of cannabis.
What I find interesting is the insurgence of quality, low-budget, crafted horror movies like Winchester, Hereditary and A Quiet Place. I look forward to more and more independent features like these that really understand the genres and the medium that they work in. Therein lies the future, good or bad, I say.
At least nothing was as bad as Solo: A Star Wars Story. Instead, I would recommend Tully or You Were Never Really Here.
