Godzilla Minus One (2023)

  This was one of the Oscar nominees I didn't get to last year and I missed it again when it came up in Movie Club, so this has been kind of a catch-up week for me.  (Also, I completely missed the nominations for both the Golden Globes and the Critics Choice Awards so my TBW list has jumped up like 100 slots.  Thank God the Oscars don't drop until the 17th.)  

Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) chickened out of being a kamikaze pilot at the end of WWII, landing instead on a small island for "repairs" and inadvertently witnessing a local monster, Godzilla, which rampaged over the island and killed all the maintenance workers.  Shikishima returned to a war-torn Tokyo to find that his family is dead and his neighbor (Sakura Andô) hates him.  He takes in refugee Noriko (Minami Hamabe) and orphaned Akiko (Sae Nagatani) but refuses to allow himself to care for them.  And then Godzilla returns, angry over nuclear testing and even larger than before.  Shikishima needs to come up with a plan to stop the giant lizard before it ruins his life even further.

Maybe this was just overhyped to me, but I didn't think it was nearly as good as Shin Godzilla.  It felt more cynical, more depressed, and more like a Jaws riff than a Godzilla movie.  Maybe because Shikishima is not a sympathetic protagonist?  Nothing about this worked for me.  

It has a ton of critical acclaim and won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects so clearly other people like it.  It's streaming on Netflix.

The Man with the Iron Fists 2 (2015)

  This has nowhere near the level of quality as the first one but that did not bother me in the slightest.  It is a big, dumb, poorly written martial arts extravaganza in the style of the Shaw Brothers and I enjoyed it.  

On a quest to find inner peace, Thaddeus (RZA), the man with the iron fists, stumbles into a small mining village run by an evil gang called Clan Beetle.  The mayor (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) is ineffectual and the local union leader (Dustin Nguyen) is trying to avoid a violent showdown so he doesn't have to confront his own past.  Oh, and the ghost of some evil dude looking for immortality is killing young women, but nobody super cares about that until it's too late.

Yes, this does feel like an extended episode of Kung Fu: The Legend Continues.  This is a feature, not a bug, but your mileage may vary.  Some people's comfort media is romantic comedy, mine is martial arts.  Tropes abound, including classics like Lone Hero Reluctantly Takes Up Arms Again for Worthy Cause, Average Guy Hides Previous Occupation as Sociopathic Badass, Honor Challenges in the Octagon, Beautiful Highly Useless Girl with Astonishingly Stupid Name Gets Kidnapped/Held Hostage, and (a personal favorite) Ancient Monk Drops a Beatdown on Fools While Espousing Non-Violence.  That is my emotional support Wire Fu, please leave it alone.

Sadly, this did not get any kind of support or cult following so it's much harder to find.  You're going to have to dust off the VPN or shell out some money to rent it.  This was obviously a labor of love for RZA, and frankly, more millionaires should have silly creative outlets like this.

Top 10 of 2024

 I saw around 200 movies this year and 45 of them were brand-new, not just new to me.  Obviously, a lot were horror movies given that was one of the parameters for my yearly 31 Days of Horror feature, and that is reflected quite heavily in the list.  Once again, this is not a critical list, this is a personal favorite list, so some movies on here might be crap but I love them.  Others I watched were very good for Discourse but I'd personally never watch them again.  They are ranked by the highly scientific method of Did I Enjoy This More Than That?  

10.  Hell Hole - A huge surprise and I ended up liking it so much more than I thought I would.  Even now, when I think about it, I laugh.  Not for everyone but it beat out so many "better" movies when I sat down and compared them.

9.  The Devil's Bath - This is the one that I talked about, I think, more than any other.  For a lot of people, this would be where The Substance would be but enough has been said about that one.  Devil's Bath is still underrated.

8.  Dune: Part 2 - This almost got lost in the shuffle because it came out way back in May but I still think about some of the cinematography and sheer visual splendor of it.  

7.  Late Night with the Devil - This was just so good.  Unparalleled use of setting and tone and Dastmalchian is completely fearless.  

6.  Wicked: Part One - Love musicals, love Wicked.  Big, over-the-top, the definition of Too Much.

5.  Cuckoo - The better Dan Stevens horror from 2024.  Great, original monster design and surprisingly heartfelt.  

4.  Deadpool and Wolverine - Ended the trilogy on a high point, something I wasn't sure was possible given it had been almost a decade since the second one.

3.  Oddity - I loved this so much.  It was like it was specifically made for me.  Other people can call it slight, but I thought it was great.  

2.  The Fall Guy - Gosling is the superior Canadian Ryan.  This is not up for debate.  

1.  Exhuma - This movie blew me away.  I will never stop recommending it to people.  So richly layered, such incredible mythology, and great performances.

So there you go.  Highly subjective, as always.  Let's take a look at what's supposed to come out in 2025!  Most of these are going to be new to me because I have not been paying attention to movie news and announcements since June.  

The Wolf Man - We're trying this shit again!

Companion - I saw the trailer for this and it looks good, very Ex Machina meets Tinder.

Captain America: Brave New World - More Marvel!

Mickey-17 - New Bong Joon-Ho!  This trailer looks bonkers and I am very conflicted about Pattinson, but bless him for never settling.

Novocaine - This looks like another John Wick clone but it's got Jack Quaid, Amber Midthunder, and Jacob Batalon so it might be worth it.

Sinners - New Ryan Coogler!  Teaming up again with Michael B. Jordan.  No further information.

Thunderbolts - B-Team Marvel!  All the also-rans from various films and TV shows.  

Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 2 - I was highly annoyed by Part 1 but I supposed I'll finish it out.

Ballerina - This feels like it was supposed to have been released ages ago and kept getting pushed back but I'm too lazy to look it up and see if that's true.  It's the Ana de Armas John Wick spin-off.

Elio - New Pixar!

28 Years Later - I guess I finally have to watch the second one.

M3GAN 2.0 - Haha!  Yes!

The Bride! - A Bride of Frankenstein remake directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal.  Could be worth it.

Michael - Antoine Fuqua is doing a Michael Jackson biopic.

Bugonia - New Lanthimos!

Predator: Badlands - From the guy who directed Prey, so could be good.  Definitely one to keep an eye on.

Wicked: Part 2 - Yes.

Dirty Dancing 2 - WTF.  I know Havana Nights wasn't great, but we're just erasing it now?  Jennifer Grey is back as Baby and I have a lot of fear.  Like, how do you even have this story without Patrick Swayze?   

Father Christmas is Back (2024)

  One last Christmas movie and then we're done for 360 days.  Unsurprisingly, this is terrible.  

Caroline Christmas-Hope (Nathalie Cox) wants a perfect Christmas.  It's the same thing she's wanted every year since her father (Kelsey Grammer) walked out on Christmas Day twenty years ago.  It makes her a neurotic wreck every year, something her bumbling husband (Kris Marshall) does nothing to help alleviate.  To make things worse, her youngest sister (Tallulah Riley) secretly visited their estranged father in Florida and invited him and his girlfriend (April Bowlby) to Caroline's house for the holidays.  

The central problem with this movie is that it had an ensemble cast that it didn't know how to use, so it tried to shoehorn in 14 different plots and 0 characterization so nothing made any sense and no one's motivations mattered.  It also tried really hard to make sure there wasn't a villain and it could have used one.  Of all the Netflix holiday movies I watched this year, it was worse than Hot Frosty and The Merry Gentlemen.  At least those were campy fun.  This was just bad.  I could pick it apart like a leftover turkey but honestly, what's the point?  You already know if you're going to enjoy it or not.  And if you do enjoy it, great.  More power to you.  It's streaming on Netflix.

It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

  Merry Christmas (Eve)!  This was supposed to go up yesterday, but I got distracted with real people.  Sorry, internet people!  

George Bailey (James Stewart) had big dreams:  see the world, become an architect or designer, and leave a lasting legacy, but circumstances always seem to intervene.  Illness, economic depression, and war conspire to keep George in the same small town he grew up in, fighting bitterly against Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore), the local land baron, and somehow managing to get married and have four children.  One Christmas Eve, it all comes crashing down as a mistake costs George everything and only divine intervention in the form of a bumbling second-rate angel (Henry Travers).  

Did you guys know there's an hour and a half of movie before you get to the part everyone remembers?  Yes.  Ninety minutes of a man railing against fate and a 30-minute Twilight Zone episode.  

With that in mind, it is utterly shocking how well this movie holds up.  A lot of credit to Stewart, one of the greatest Old Hollywood actors, for embodying the bitterness and despair of a Good Man.  A man who desperately wants things but is constrained by his conscience.  Who believes in doing the Right Thing even when he hates it.  And the other standout is Barrymore as the cartoonishly evil, and still somehow super-realistic Mr. Potter.  (Honorable mention to Gloria Grahame who didn't have a lot to do here but looked fine as hell doing it.)

It's 45 minutes too long and depressing as shit, but goddamn, what a movie.  Christmas classic.  It's streaming for free with ads on the Roku Channel and Amazon's ad-supported tier FreeVee, in case you feel like throwing eyeballs at one of our own Mr. Potters.

Miracle on 34th St (1947)

  Christmas week continues with a TCM classic.  

When Doris Walker (Maureen O'Hara) has to fire her Santa Claus for public drunkenness the day of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, she's sure she's going to be fired.  But a replacement presents himself immediately.  Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) is so popular, he's hired on to be the official Santa for Macy's flagship store, but the problem is that he thinks he's the real Santa.  And the store's official psychologist, Mr. Sawyer (Porter Hall), thinks that makes Kris a dangerous lunatic.  He conspires to have Kris committed, setting up a legal fight where the state of New York must decide a) if there is such a person as Santa Clause, b) if he is an official resident and eligible for employment, and c) whether or not he represents a danger to himself and others.

I did not remember this mostly being about the court case, but I may have been confusing it with the 1994 version with Mara Wilson and Richard Attenborough.  We watched both pretty interchangeably through my childhood.  But I haven't seen either one in a couple of decades so I could be mis-remembering both.

Anyway, the real villain of this movie is Fred Gailey, the lawyer.  Telling a woman you're sucking up to her kid so she'll date you is gross, undermining her parenting with said child in the interest of promoting your own beliefs is super gross, and volunteering her labor while you plan to undermine her parenting with an accomplice just makes you an asshole.  Honestly, telling a single mom that you're throwing away a safe, lucrative career to bring a bullshit publicity storm about Santa Clause in court that could have been settled in chambers and framing it as her problem because she "lacks imagination" is an egregious failure of emotional intelligence.

This Christmas classic is streaming on Disney+ and Paramount+.  Don't watch the colorized version.  It adds another year onto Ted Turner's life and we can't have that.

Tokyo Godfathers (2003)

  Merry Solstice, everyone!  Thus begins our round of Christmas movie offerings, courtesy of Movie Club, and it is getting Festive AF in here.  Content warning:  homophobic slurs, violence, attempted suicide, child endangerment

An unlikely trio of homeless people: Gin (Tôru Emori), an alcoholic, Hana (Yoshiaki Umegaki), a transwoman, and Miyuki (Aya Okamoto), a teenage runaway, find a baby abandoned in the trash on Christmas Eve and begin a journey to find the parents.  Along the way, truths are revealed, burdens are shared, and people learn what true family means.

This is considered a modern classic especially for Christmas but it was just okay for me.  I liked the characters and I thought the animation was really well done but the longer it went on, the less interest I had.  There were so many coincidences and random events that turned out to be really significant to the characters' pasts and it got really old for me.  But as always, your mileage may vary.  It's for damn sure better than Triplets of Belleville.  

Would I watch it again?  No.  Would I recommend it to people?  Yes. It's streaming for free on Tubi, the Roku Channel, and Amazon's ad-supported tier FreeVee.  Tubi is better about not making jarring cuts to commercial.