2020 EOTY Entertainment Lists

2020 Publication Thread
Slant:
The 50 Best Films of 2020
The 25 Best TV Shows of 2020
The 25 Best Home Video Releases of 2020

 

Omitting "How to with John Wilson" is a crime.

 

Lots of stuff on their film list I need to catch up on. Have only seen 5 of the top 20.

 

That Slant list is going to help me catch up. I have only seen 14 films this year.

 

Features - Reverse Shot

Speaking of!

 

Never Rarely Sometimes Always is going to be a hard film to beat. It has a confidence that you rarely see in American films, and it talks about abortion in a frank way that American films almost never do.

 

It is sad not to have the Film Comment list this year. We had only just lost the Village Voice list a few years ago.

As great as Nomadland supposedly is, it is frustrating that it is walled off from the general public like a normal year. One of the benefits of the shift to streaming this year is that (almost) everything is widely available. Waiting weeks, and sometimes months, for movies to come out after the year officially ended always made list-making difficult.

 

The Best Movies of 2020

Richard Brody/The New Yorker

 

It is surprising to see Miranda July receive so much critical acclaim.

I watched Dick Johnson is Dead last night and it is hard to know which way to fall. It feels a bit exploitative but there is a real heart to it.

My worst of the year has six possible inductees even though I limit it to five. Getting ten films for a top ten is harder this year.

 

Waiting patiently for the TSPDT update to the 21st century films list next month. They have a good aggregate for each year's films too.

 

I always forget about that website. It is a treasure.

 

Kajillionaire was good, but I'm very surprised to see it so high on so many lists. City Hall looks interesting, but I'm not ready to watch 4.5 hours of government "at work".

 

City Hall is for my next day off work. Wiseman films are always worth the length.

 

2020 was not a great year for cinema. That can happen when a pandemic starts in one of the largest countries at the beginning of the year and spreads worldwide before the snow has melted. While there are gems, the simple fact of the matter is that when significantly less films are produced, there are going to be less reasons to celebrate.

However, before the top ten is revealed, a bottom five is in order. One cannot appreciate the highs without suffering through the lows; one cannot eat in a fancy restaurant every night or win in every contest. This list is incomplete for multiple reasons; firstly, there was no need to sit through WONDER WOMAN or DOOLITTLE because there are things that are best moved on from at a certain point. If the list came out in a month, more likely there would be other films to highlight. A special highlight is deserved for the sound mix of TENET, even if the rest of the film is passable enough. All these lists are incomplete by definition, so here are the five most painful experiences.




5. BORAT 2
DIRECTED BY: JASON WOLINER

It is often said that comedy ages worse than all the other genres. There is a lot of truth to this; comedy is about challenging norms and highlighting the absurdity of life, but these things are always changing. While the first film was a welcome bit of therapy for the sane people living through Bush's wars, anti-Muslim xenophobia, and the Patriot Act, the sequel finds it harder to highlight these groups in the same illuminating way, mostly because we have long since gone past the point where the far-right couched their true intentions in euphemisms and newspeak. Instead the film invests more time in the fictional narrative, which was never the strength of the original film in the first place. Having Borat and his daughter say absurd things is easy; the art is in giving people enough rope to hang themselves.




4. THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7
DIRECTED BY: AARON SORKIN

Someone needs to stop this man before he permanently destroys the ability for the American liberal to think clearly. For decades, he has infected the political discourse with his naive ideas about how things should run, while at the same time the American conservative movement has increasingly coarsened their language and learned how to fight them at every point. There is a lot to hate, from literally re-using lines from his earlier works to the scene where the courtroom stands up and claps like the end of a Disney film, but any sort of deity that does exist will have to judge Sorkin for turning an iconic leftist like Abbie Hoffman into a "love the system, hate the players" Democrat.



3. HILLBILLY ELEGY
DIRECTED BY: RON HOWARD

For all of the discourse about how J.D. Vance's book pushed certain narratives about Southern people, the movie ignores all of it for a generic story about a man overcoming his embarrassing past. The unintentional comedy of the year, you have a grandma with a Terminator obsession (which is never brought up again), a protagonist with less charisma than a tree, and Amy Adams screaming wildly, flailing about in search of a three-dimensional character while Howard either slept or paid attention to his next milquetoast project.



2. IRRESISTIBLE
DIRECTED BY: JON STEWART

Has anyone ever had such a cultural footprint, only to be proven a false prophet by the passage of time in the same way Jon Stewart has? He made waves in his "takedown" of Crossfire and Tucker Carlson, but Carlson is now the most visible cable news host in the country. He scolded Jim Cramer and Mad Money, but Cramer is still around giving his dumb advice. He rallied to restore sanity, but our politics have become much more absurd in the ten years since the march. His legacy is a plethora of imitators, which range from the incisive (Jon Oliver) to the brainless (Samantha Bee). Stewart's failure was a misunderstanding of politics, which is that you have to fight in order to get anything done. Near the end of the film, the Big Bad Washington Insider is embarrassed by what he thought were country bumpkins, and the daughter of his candidate all but looks directly into the camera and gives us a Poli Sci 101 explanation about how they are only important to people every four years and then they are cast aside. An Idiot's Guide to Politics.



1. HAMILTON
DIRECTED BY: THOMAS KAIL

It was always lurking in the shadows. People would pay hundreds of dollars to see it on Broadway. Others would tell you that if they played you one song, they would have to play the whole thing. Much like The Blob, The Thing, or the dinosaurs of JURASSIC PARK, it was always going to escape and terrorize other forms of media beyond the theater. Casting Black and Hispanic actors in the role of the "Founding Fathers" is only revolutionary in the minds of the unimaginative, as it does nothing to investigate the true nature of these people or their legacies. George Washington is the fatherly saint, Alexander Hamilton is a genius, and Thomas Jefferson's sins are only mentioned briefly in the show's version of a diss session. There is a reason that it is so popular among wealthy liberals; it allows them to engage in idol worship without having to deal with the messy details. The play literally ends with the characters going around and saying how great Alexander Hamilton was, and the cherry on top of the sundae is the idea that he was an anti-slavery crusader, while information uncovered in this year revealed that he did own slaves. We deserve better in three-plus hours of hagiography.

 

I don’t know if it’s pandemic related, but I didn’t see any movies I thought were all that bad this year. There were some disappointments, or things that didn’t completely work for me, but nothing as bad as the stuff I’ve thought of as previous year’s worst. I think partially it is that without a theater release window there was less of an impetus to see films as they came out and be part of the “conversation”, where in other years if a movie came out that I didn’t think I’d like, I’d give it a shot since my AMC pass or whatever would cover it. But the worst stuff I saw this year mostly made me indifferent, rather than being outright awful.

 

Lol is that really how Chicago 7 ends?

 

I haven't seen Chicago 7 (yet) or Hamilton (maybe ever) but I always love seeing Tetra's worst of the year list. Hillbilly Ellegy would easily top mine.

 

Funny how all 5 of those films are, in one way or another, political failures.

The only two genuinely bad movies I saw that come to mind are Mulan & New Mutants. And, both were based on things I love, & both bad in ways that were fun to think about, with some genuine positive qualities squeezing through here & there. So, no 2020 films for me personally that were overall negative experiences.

 

I am just waiting for some of my real life friends to get mad that I included Hamilton and yell at me. A former co-worker is going to be apoplectic.

 

Truthfully there were only six films in contention, and Tenet really wasn't that bad.

However, the politics of 2020 did make me angrier. They did to Sanders in 2020 worse than they did in 2016, and in 2016 it was a little poetic (although harmful for us) that the Democrats got exactly what they wanted, no Sanders and the Republicans nominating Trump, and then lost anyway. They did nothing to fix their problems but got to ride a wave of disease into a landslide victory that they will use to silence the left. It was just more depressing than last time.

 

That description of Hamilton kind of kills my desire to see it. I usually want to check things out and assess on my own terms, but it reminds me of a conversation I had in a recent book club. There’s is this strange idea that in order to improve representation we need to recast iconic characters as people of color. Black James Bond, black Superman etc. This idea isn’t necessarily bad. I think there’s no reason why fictional characters have to have the same depiction over and over, race included. But why not just give people of color the resources to create or bring their own characters to the big screen? It’s feels insulting to say “okay, now it’s your turn to be Bond. We gift it to you!”

I know Hamilton wasn’t created by a white man, as these things typically are, but if it’s really just casts famous white leaders with people of color without using that to explore their true nature... what’s the point? It’s feels the same as when people celebrate the first black X, while ignoring the context that it was white people who were excluding them from those institutions in the first place.

 

I can’t believe the Jon Stewart movie came out this year. Feels like forever ago

 

The call to diversify James Bond is maddening because the whole point of the character and the story is the racism and misogyny. However, people don't want to admit to watching that so they try to find ways to wash it down easier.

 

I know at least for Daveed and Christopher Jackson they were Lin's friends who I believe he tailored the songs too, I think the problem is that he probably does lionize the founding fathers but yeah it's weird how it skirts around slavery

 

I wanted to finish my top ten tonight but at the last minute a bunch of films leaked. Nomadland is first to tackle.