Yesterday marked the 300th post in five years of this project, which feels like a bit of a milestone. Five years of compulsively writing about new movies. So here’s a retrospective on those reviews:
2018
We started doing this together in May of this year. We saw 11 movies that first June, which is not a record, but really puts into perspective how much things have cooled off since.
It’s June when I started to get into the swing of hate watching movies: “Gave Tag a second chance this afternoon with friend. I had previously described my failed attempt to watch it a few days ago as the equivalent of a gas station attendant refusing to serve me the old taquitos under the heat lamp.” I may have described my impression of the first thirty minutes to someone as “A movie about five actors who needed some extra cash,” but I was kind of charmed by this film in the end.
In July I wrote a eulogy for Moviepass and the 45 movies that we saw in a mere seven months on the service. AV Club called the 90% drop in subscribers a form of “exsanguination”. As I live, Moviepass, like a thirsty ex has been sending me increasingly alarmed emails about how we should get back together and also have I considered reading the CEO’s new autobiography?
That first summer was host to not just Daveed Diggs’s Blindspotting, but also Sorry to Bother You starring Atlanta alum Lakeith Stanfeld, and John David Washington in BlacKkKlansman, all in the span of a few weeks, which set the tone for our fascination and collection of movies in the style of black surrealism. This was the summer of Crazy Rich Asians, which became our bedbug’s first ever movie in the hospital; A Simple Favor, a movie that has withstood repeated viewings; and Assassination Nation, which started out as a niche #MeToo movie by Sam Levinson and vaulted into an ongoing 5 year-long inside joke on this blog to describe the under-recognized indie films that I will booster til the cows come home (I see you Girl, Asleep).
Hellfest, which was written by the same brilliant person, Akela Cooper, who wrote M3GAN, came out for Halloween. As did Searching, which has come full circle, first as a novelty, presciently waiting in the wings of a global pandemic and then as a convenient format directly after the production hiatus that made 2022 into such a bad year for movie releases.
We established our hatred of space movies with Ad Astra and First Man.
[Jennifer Lawrence] said that after finishing up the “Hunger Games” trilogy in 2015, she started feeling fans’ disillusionment. “I was like, ‘Oh no, you guys are here because I’m here, and I’m here because you’re here. Wait, who decided that this was a good movie?’”
The one movie that confirmed that was “Passengers.” “Adele told me not to do it! She was like, ‘I feel like space movies are the new vampire movies.’ I should have listened to her,” Lawrence said. (The article also details an infamous night at the Greenwich Village gay bar Pieces where Lawrence and Adele joined the regular people to sing karaoke.)
IndieWire, Nov 2, 2022
We fell in love with Joaquin Phoenix in the fall of 2018, with Sisters Brother, You Were Never Really Here, AND Don’t Worry He Can’t Get Far on Foot (I’ve seen the first two a few more times and loved them even more the second and third time through). The slow march to Best Actor in 2020 in which his acceptance speeches at earlier ceremonies became increasingly unhinged filled me with such sweet anticipation for this culmination of talent and unphotogenic earnestness.
This was the first of two years of attendance of the Cinequest Film Festivals (on the blog, I’d managed to make it most years since I moved). The two stand outs from that first recorded year were Burnt Orange Heresy (which constituted a comeback for Elizabeth Debicki, who had spent the majority of the year’s movies stuck in a wall á la the Superbowl release of Cloverfield Paradox, by the way here’s the five year anniversary coverage of that movie, claiming it presaged an era of shitty Netflix blockbusters) and the bone-chilling, uncanny Survival Skills, an eerie satire of police training videos that I cannot unsee.
2019
A difficult year when most of the unfinished drafts over the last five years exist (fun fact: there are ten unpublished reviews of movies that exist in a perpetual state of limbo on this site).
May: we saw ten movies, including Detective Pikachu and Booksmart, but also, weirdly, live-action Aladdin and Red Joan. This was the most fecund year for reviews ever, over 70 new movies, despite the fact that so few of them stand out here.
2020
March: an innocent feasting on Cinequest movies in contrast to April when, presumably, we were just watching feel-good Mighty Ducks and made-for-TV Disney nostalgia to get through the weirdness.
Spring: discovered Ovid and the Art of Love, still one of my favorite movies about Ovid of all time.
June marks the start of when I couldn’t shut up about my go-to recommendation for cinephiles, The Vast of Night.
Tenet and The New Mutants were part of our short-lived infatuation with drive-in movies. We also saw Jurassic Park at the West Wind Drive In about six thousand times that year. (I never wrote a review for TNM, because I got a job as a freelance writer that year and spent 20 hours writing about Anya Taylor-Joy’s hair in that movie instead.)
Cinequest shifted gears to the online festival, Cinejoy, and that fall I took it as a personal challenge to see as much as I could from home with 18 movies in two weeks.
2021
The first few months of 2021 were brutal in terms of movies, but probably amazing in terms of television: Dash and Lily and Bridgerton.
Spring: for some reason still unclear to me, Cinejoy returned not six months since its last appearance and I doubled down, 22 movies. This festival featured the top three reviews ever on this site, some of which are cited in the press pages of those movie’s websites: the mesmerizing documentary Hunting Bigfoot, the disappointing A Little Italian Vacation, and the profoundly weird Pretenders.
- Hunting Bigfoot (323)
- Luca (64)
- A Little Italian Vacation (34)
- The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (27)
- Pretenders (24)
I periodically discuss this freak occurrence of having your little anonymous hobby become a temporarily hot thing in a relatively niche community and find that most people have pretty entertaining stories about evanescent internet microfame: a Steam review that’s read thousands of times or a post on social media that randomly gained traction. I’d be lying if there wasn’t a little voice in my head that whispers “become a bigfoot hunting site for the liiiiiikes” about once every month. I mean, I’m not entirely opposed to the idea? I like Robert Michael Pyle, the poet, naturalist, and bigfoot booster quite a bit actually. I’m just not sure how rewarding long term that lifestyle would be, as evidenced by the absolutely unhinged lifestyle of the subject of the aforementioned documentary.
June: a note Wife wrote me about Luca is still on my desktop today. It was the only time ever that she’s acted as stenographer for a movie review in five years and I think about it all the time, seeing something with her a month before this spawn was born, laughing so hard we cried, scared and completely ignorant of how things would change.
Looking back on movies that were part of the B.BB (before bedbug time) and ABB (after Bedbug), so much of my enjoyment of movies is about seeing them with Wife. We saw maybe six or seven movies together in 2021-22, a big difference from when we just started all of this and were seeing that many in the span of a few weeks. I think the initial fear was that we’d never get back to seeing anything together again and it’s still difficult for us to find time to see something, but whenever it does happen those movies are especially anticipated, storied, like my ongoing saga in not having seen Raya and the Last Dragon. I think I spent a lot of time B.BB thinking that I would agonize over missing out and as it happens, when you’re in it, you don’t think very hard about what else you could be doing, and also most of what you’re missing out on is huge disappointment, especially in this most recent span of twelve to eighteen months. I think that when the Bed Bug is old enough to see movies, there’s going to be a new shift in mindset as well: how do I get you caught up on all the Star Wars movies succinctly? How many Pixar movies can we watch in a row? For now, I’m just biding my time.
October: Some genius thought it would be fine for me to see a Marvel movie four weeks after I had a baby. The tentative return to theaters with friends and then to see Dune a second time in November. The winter was a time of careful sifting over what would be worthy of sacrificing sleep to see versus things that I was at piece of never thinking about again.
2022
This past year, my favorites to see were Everything, Everywhere, and Incredibly Close; Fire Island; Nope; Bullet Train; Do Revenge; and Bodies, Bodies, Bodies. I was trying to think of an emergent themes that could explain cultural tastes this year (Vox says it’s our fear of old people) and mostly what’s jumped out at me is that I’m a huge fan of queer romance, I guess?
But my favorites to write were All the Old Knives, maybe Jurassic World?, and Amsterdam: catty negative reviews that start with a phrase like “in the racially diverse paradise that is Carmel-by-the-Sea” or “in the racially diverse paradise that is Amsterdam 1939”. I didn’t actually feel that catty with Jurassic World, I just really enjoyed that movie six months after everyone else had forgotten it existed.
2023
Five years is a long time to do anything and who knows how long this will last, but after nearly 300,000 words on contemporary movies, I have a lot of anticipation for this year in movies. There are so, so many cool Marvel franchises due for liftoff, some capstone movies like Mission Impossible and Dune: the Sequel, the Musical, and the hunt is on for the scrappy, weird indie that’ll take the world by storm (Return to Seoul, I’m looking at you).
