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.

The War of the Rohirrim (2024)

  Wish I could say this was good.  Content warning:  dead animals, some blood, war violence

Héra (Gaia Wise) is the only daughter of Helm Hammerhand (Brian Cox), King of Rohan, and has grown up fighting and riding alongside her two brothers.  Helm wants to marry her to a prince of Gondor, to solidify alliance with that kingdom, but one of his nobles, Freca (Shaun Dooley), wants Héra to marry his son, Wulf (Luca Pasqualino), and challenges Helm in front of the entire court.  Helm kills Freca and banishes Wulf, who swears to tear Rohan apart until he gets Héra.

This was a lot of bloodshed over a dude not being able to hear the word No from a woman.  Also, a lot of patriarchal bullshit about how her only role is to bear heirs.  Very lame.

The character animation is beautiful.  The background animation is beautiful.  I just wish there had been any effort made to bring the two together.  There were scenes where characters didn't touch the ground while riding or moving and it was very jarring to the eyes.  And this movie cost a gazillion dollars!  It should not look like a shoestring budget, broke-as-shit Miyazaki knock-off.  

It goes on way too long, tries too hard to hammer in its Lord of the Rings setting, and tries to overcomplicate an extremely simple plot.  I love that someone tried to make an original story using the established universe.  I hate that it was this Gucci-with-a-Y ass movie.

Too Funny to Fail (2014)

  Well, I got in one documentary this year, at least.  

The Dana Carvey Show was a prime-time sketch comedy show that ran for seven episodes in 1996.  It starred Dana Carvey, coming off an incredibly successful run on Saturday Night Live, Robert Smigel, one of SNL's head writers, and then-unknowns Stephen Colbert and Steve Carrell.  It was intended to be edgy comedy that pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in prime-time network TV but was hamstrung by network interference (ABC had just been bought by Disney), advertiser desertion, and struggled to find its audience after a lead-in of Home Improvement.

Obviously, the documentary is full of comedians so it's very funny.  Personally, I never liked Dana Carvey's comedy, I was slightly too young for his SNL days and none of his movies have particularly wowed me.  He does seem like he's very funny in person, though.  I have no memory of ever coming across The Dana Carvey Show.  I think all the episodes are on YouTube if you want to check them out.  The documentary is on Hulu.  Which also got bought out by Disney.  Which is darkly funny.

She-Devil (1989)

  File this under "crap movies that I unironically love," if you must.  Content warning:  dead animal (gerbil, dog), urine

Ruth (Roseanne Barr) tries to be a good wife and mother but it's hard when she isn't appreciated.  Bob (Ed Begley, Jr.) is an upwardly mobile accountant embarrassed by her frumpy appearance and gauche manners, so when he gets a chance to hitch his star (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) to beautiful glamorous romance novelist Mary Fisher (Meryl Streep), he abandons Ruth with the children.  Ruth has had enough, however, and she is not about to take this betrayal laying down.

The defense would like to call its first witness:  the gender politics are not that bad, considering when this was made.  Yes, the movie relishes the fall of Streep's Barbie-like character more than Bob's but it's not like he gets off scot-free, and she kind of has a redemption arc from being a home-wrecker.

"But Roseanne Barr!"  I know.  It was 1989.  I can't fucking change that.  Just like I can't change the fat-shaming inherent in the film.  I will say that Ruth's "glow up" remains firmly in the realm of achievable and realistic.  She doesn't have a drastic makeover, she just looks like herself with better grooming and wardrobe.  (There's a whole separate gushing conversation about Mary Fisher's transformation, but I don't have time to get into it because I have shit to do today.)

Is this movie a little dumb, a little (very) silly, and hugely dated?  Yes.  But I love it and I don't care.  It's streaming for free with ads on Tubi, the Roku Channel, and PlutoTV.

The Merry Gentlemen (2024)

  I know I said I wasn't going to do another one of these but then my friend was like "Let's do another one!" and I was like "Oh no" and she was like "Oh yeah" and I was like "why did you turn into the Kool-Aid Man and who's going to fix that hole in my wall?"

Ashley (Britt Roberson) was a Broadway dancer in the annual holiday show, Jingle Belles, for 14 years, until she was replaced mid-season by a younger dancer (Bella Shephard).  Lacking other options, Ashley returns to her small home town only to find that her parents' bar, The Rhythm Room, is financially underwater and if they don't get $30,000 by January 1st, it'll get turned into a juice bar.  So Ashley decides to put on an all-male revue, recruiting a hot handyman (Chad Michael Murray), hot bartender (Colt Prattes), hot brother-in-law (Marc Anthony Samuel), hot cab driver (Hector David, Jr.) and hot barfly (Maxwell Caulfield).  She teaches them like six routines in 2 days and turns them loose to rave reviews and an audience of twelve people.  Somehow, they still make money and it seems like all Ashley's plans are working out until she gets a call from her old boss (Meredith Thomas) offering her a raise and her job back if she will ditch that town and do the big Christmas show with the Jingle Belles.

I don't even know where to begin.  This is a movie for people that thought Magic Mike XXL had too much plot and characterization.  It's so two-dimensional it should count as an animated feature.  Nothing in this made sense.  A trope-y script is a given, I understand it's part of the draw of this kind of movie, but even the tropes made no sense.  Nobody fires their headliner without cause midway through a performance season.  But the movie is so committed to Ashley being blameless, because otherwise they'd have to add actual dialogue and humanity to basically a paper doll in a slouchy hat.  Also, everybody's hair is weird and plasticky.  

Clearly, I am not the audience for this.  I hope everyone involved had a very nice time on set and got paid a lot of money.  That's the only reason this should exist.  It's streaming on Netflix.  You can do better.

Rio, I Love You (2014)

  This is the third entry in the Cities of Love series.  It's a little uneven but I expected this.

A series of love stories swirl together in Rio de Janeiro.  A dancer (Rodrigo Santoro) struggles with a potential career change that would take him away from his girlfriend (Bruna Linzmeyer).  A man (Eduardo Sterblitch) tries to understand why his grandmother (Fernanda Montenegro) is living on the streets.  A cab driver (Marcelo Serrado) deals with a jet-lagged actor (Ryan Kwanten).  A sculptor (Vincent Kassel) tries to find inspiration in the sand.  

There were vignettes I liked more than others.  My least favorite was probably the one with John Turturro and Vanessa Paradis but there were enough "good" ones that I still feel really comfortable recommending this. 

It is a tourism pitch, of course, but holy shit is it a good one.  Every aerial shot of the city is stunning.  Gorgeous lighting and composition.  Anthologies are always a mixed bag but if you're in the mood for a whole bunch of different riffs on the concept of love, give it a shot.  It's streaming on Kanopy with a library card. 

The Jazz Singer (1927)

  Content warning:  blackface

Jack Robin (Al Jolson) wants to be a jazz singer but on the eve of his big break on Broadway, he learns that his father (Werner Oland), a cantor, is too sick to perform at synagogue.  Even though Jack has been estranged for many years for not following his father's footsteps, he feels conflicted.  Should he follow his dreams and sing secular music or should he listen to his parents and perform only for God?  

So this is the big one.  The first talking picture.  Without taking away that achievement, which was pretty remarkable, this isn't a particularly good film on its own merits.  The story is lame, the songs are crap, and it hasn't aged well (the minstrel routine he does is full-body cringe).  It's a historical artifact but really not worth watching outside of a film class.  Still, as a film nerd, I felt like I had to so I did.  And now I'm saving you all.  Don't watch this, even though it is on Tubi for free.  Watch Singin' in the Rain instead.  

In other news, I watched the first season of Mob Psycho 100 (the anime, not the live action) on Hulu.  The animation took me a while to get into, it's not a style I like, but I did really enjoy the story and the characters.  If you liked One Punch Man, it's done by the same people.  In fact, there's a cameo early in one of the episodes.  The first season is only 12 episodes so you can knock it out in a day.

Hot Frosty (2024)

  I had a whole post here but Blogger erased it.  Content warning: cancer

Kathy (Lacey Chabert) is not ready to move on yet after the death of her husband, no matter how many gentle hints or how much well-meaning advice she gets from her small-town, nosy-ass neighbors.  Then she wraps a scarf around a weirdly detailed himbo ice sculpture and suddenly she is responsible for a whole new living being.  Jack (Dustin Milligan) has only been alive a couple of minutes but he already knows two things: he loves Kathy and television is the greatest invention.  Things he doesn't understand include public nudity, the melting point of ice, and breaking and entering.  That last one brings him into the crosshairs of the local sheriff (Craig T. Robinson), desperate to be taken seriously.  Kathy has to keep her snowman on ice before the fuzz turns up the heat.

You see what you people have done to me?  This is not my bag at all, and I needed a goddamn Sherpa to help me navigate all the references (hint: if it seems like a weird non-sequitur, it's a reference) to other Netflix holiday movies.  I didn't even know they made that many!

Chabert has made a career of doing these and honestly, good for her.  Milligan I did not recognize but he was in Schitt's Creek and Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency so I have definitely seen him.  It did seem a little like a Brooklyn Nine-Nine skit because of Robinson and Joe Lo Truglio as the cops, but I wasn't mad at it.  It's pretty wholesome.

Anyway, this is a VERY SPECIFIC genre and chances are good, you already know if it's for you or not. If you're familiar with my rants about the Born Sexy Yesterday trope, this is another example.  And no, it is not less creepy if Sexy Baby Brain is a dude.  It's on Netflix.

Downsizing (2017)

  Tyler watched this on the plane back from our trip to Ireland in 2018 and laughed until he made seal noises.  I'm just now getting to it but we very clearly have different ideas of what's funny.

Paul (Matt Damon) is an average guy who just wants to feel like he's helping.  When he hears about a procedure that allows people to shrink to 5" tall, purportedly saving the planet by using a fraction of the resources, he is interested but has a hard time selling the concept to his wife, Audrey (Kristin Wiig), until a consultation shows that their standard of living would also shift and that as Smalls, they could live like millionaires.  He is all set to live in luxury, and then he meets Ngoc Lan Tran (Hong Chau), a Vietnamese dissident and political asylum seeker who was downsized against her will and lost a leg in her escape.

This is a good representation of what it looks like when privileged white people decide to help and get involved when people of color are already doing the work.  Paul means well, he genuinely wants to help, but he doesn't really know how and he's kind of a putz.  The movie is much nicer to Paul than I think is deserved, but I also understand that being mean to people for trying defeats the purpose.

Doesn't matter because the true star of this movie is Hong Chau.  Give her all the roles.  She is great.  Also, Christoph Waltz!  Remember when that dude was in everything?  So good.  

I don't particularly like Alexander Payne.  I think he makes smarmy movies for smarmy, self-indulgent people, but that's me.  Maybe you like this.  Tyler did.  It's currently streaming on Amazon Prime.