Like almost everything else this past year, we're going to have to begin a little wonky. Up is down! Left is right! It's 73 degrees in February, Jennifer Lopez isn't nominated for an Oscar, and everything is fine and everything is terrible and who among us can tell when one becomes the other? Like time, space, and the concept of justice, my movie year (and the exhaustive lists that follow it) is just a bit sideways right now. If I were to follow the conventions that have guided my grad school years, I would have to start this post by talking about how (comparatively) few movies I made time to see this year, I would think some thoughts about how the thing you do for money--even if you love doing it--tends to cannibalize the things you do for joy, and then I'd vaguely gesture toward allowing the joy things to re-colonize the space from which grad school so thoughtlessly cast them.
But hey, guess what? This year, I'm sitting pretty on 85 movies. This isn't a press-time record (my book-keeping gets spottier the further you go back, but I'm reasonably sure I hit hit 90 movies in 2013 before the Oscars), and it's certainly not an all-year record (both 2011 and 2013 have got around 100 movies from that calendar year to their name), but it's a damn sight better than I've done in half a decade. I've no idea what I did to reclaim my time/the movies this year, but I made it work much better than I have since I was an undergrad. (The secret ingredient, it turns out, is watching a movie whenever you know you should be working on your dissertation.)
So where's the problem? I've got far more raw material than, say, 2016, when I somehow managed to dredge up a top 20 with honorable mentions having only seen 50 movies. The problem, dear reader(s), is that, for lack of a better phrase, I'm pooped. Maybe it's because, though I love the movies that came out this year, none of them swept me off my feet and declared themselves as inevitable, which means that I have no idea what my favorite movie of the year is, nor will I once I've written this list to its end. Maybe it's partly due to Letterboxd--these lists were once a precious, yearly phenomenon, in which everything I wanted to say about movies had to condense and erupt in one wild-eyed, week-long bout of frantic keyboard percussion. But now that Letterboxd is a thing, I'm jotting down my thoughts about movies every week. And maybe it's just that the entire structure of my life right now is [need to write a thing ------>choose not to write that thing.] But for whatever combination of reasons, I very strongly considered just not doing these lists--posting a top 25 to Letterboxd, calling it good, and getting back to what I really wanted to do (crying to youtube videos about Lord of the Rings).
But no--no way in hell am I going to break this 15 year tradition because I need more time to weep into my pillow while Merry and Pippin montage past my bleary eyes! Every other year, I'd be monologuing about saving the movies in my life, but this year I need to work on saving my passion. Dissertations are writhing, unholy and nebulous things, whose casual disregard for chronology and physics is truly staggering, but that doesn't mean every other part of my life needs to do the same. So my resolution this year isn't to watch more movies--it's to do more things with joy. So here I go!
As I mentioned earlier, I absolutely fecking love the cinematic year that was 2019. I know the consensus was that it was an off year, but what is anyone even seeing? I don't even know how to order my top 20. Hell, I just re-wrote the top 10 on the fly, changed 4 of the 5 movies in the top 5, and it all seems completely fine. There's such depth and variety here--if you couldn't find something to watch in 2019, you weren't looking very hard.
If you're new here (which is a ridiculous idea, because it implies that you are here to begin with, which is a terrible choice on your part), here's how the format works. I'll rattle off my top 20, while doing my very best to not to throw brevity down the stairs (even though he's waiting for me so politely and looks ever so throwable). I've got a self-imposed two-sentence limit to each entry, because a) I am old, and can only type for so long without my hands falling to pieces, b) I will at least pretend to respect your time, if not my own, and c) there are only so many adverbs to use before I run out. But we'll see how all that goes. After that, if, for some reason, you need to sacrifice more of your precious minutes to this (and you only have so many!), I will politely offer some thoughts on the best scenes of the year, and the worst movies, for your masochistic viewing pleasure.
In interest of transparency, here's a list of all the movies I saw this year. Normally, I'd mention something here about distributors keeping the smaller and/or international (...er) films from the middle of the country, but honestly this year had us pretty well covered. So while there are a couple notable glaring exceptions (looking at you, Portrait of a Lady on Fire), most of big holes in my viewing this year came from time issues/laziness (sorry, The Souvenir, Clemency, Les Miserables, Diane, Invisible Life, Asako 1 and 2).
1917, Ad Astra, Atlantics, American Factory, Avengers: Endgame, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Bombshell, Booksmart, Captain Marvel, Cats, Climax, Consequences, Dark Phoenix, Dear Ex, Detective Pikachu, Diamantino, Dolemite is My Name, Downton Abbey, The Farewell, Ford v Ferrari, Frozen 2, Giant Little Ones, Glass, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, The Great Hack, Harriet, A Hidden Life, High Life, Honeyland, How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, Hustlers, I Lost My Body, The Irishman, Isn't It Romantic, It Chapter Two, Jawline, Jojo Rabbit, Joker, Judy, Klaus, Knife+Heart, Knives Out, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Last Christmas, The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part, The Lighthouse, The Lion King, Little, Little Monsters, Little Women, Ma, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, Marriage Story, Midsommar, Midway, Missing Link, Monos, The Mustange, The Nightingale, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, One Child Nation, One Cut of the Dead, Pain and Glory, Parasite, Rafiki, The Red Sea Diving Resort, Ready or Not, Rocketman, Sauvage, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Shadow, Shazam!, Sorry Angel, Spider-Man: Far from Home, Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker, Styx, Synonyms, They Shall Not Grow Old, Tigers are Not Afraid, Toy Story 4, Transit, The Two Popes, Uncut Gems, Us, Waves
Alright, without further ado (it's already been adone), let's jump in!
Honorable mentions: though they didn't make the cut, I'm grateful for grand and gory silliness of Shadow, the tenderness and brutality of Sauvage, and those wacky wacky Doppelgänger in Us.
(Spoiler alert: a piece of these here and there might be stolen from my letterboxd review, because either a) I liked what I wrote there and thought it would add something here or b) was being super lazy.)
20. Diamantino (dir. Gabriel Abrantes, Daniel Schmidt)
So difficult to sum up all the things that are great about this Playskool My First Fascist Takeover, all of its truly bonkers ideas (cloning! gender-bending refugees! giant hallucinatory puppies!) coalescing as a Big Dumb Fascist Face on a throw pillow. Major points for Carloto Cotta's deeply stupid and intensely committed performance (which you can see in this wild trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biyvbS9WdiU).
(streaming on the Criterion channel, rentable on amazon)
19. Transit (dir. Christian Petzold)
Another take on the world's slide into fascism, Petzold updates the Anna Seghers wartime novel to fit a world in which time no longer moves like it's supposed to. Voice-over locks the characters into their own actions, removing their agency and their status as protagonists even as they go about their lives: everything is watching, or being watched, and the act of storytelling is always uglier than it seems.
(streaming on Prime video, also rentable on amazon)
18. 1917 (dir. Sam Mendes)
Throwing a sentimental bone to teenage me, who was very passionate about Movies About Sensitive Men Trying Very Hard in Insensitive Places, of which 1917 is a great example. Points for the first act's horror bones, points for the second act that flips a switch and becomes a different, more beautiful, more urgent movie, and points for the whole film, that consistently obfuscates our need for scale, resolution, and meaning.
(in theaters now)
17. Knives Out (dir. Rian Johnson)
Is this the best thing to happen to the Whodunit genre in a decade or two? Furious, funny, and fascinated--a wiggly slithering thing that doesn't settle into its real motives until the very last minutes.
(in theaters)
16. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (dir. Quentin Tarantino)
I'm still extremely not sold on the ending's violence (specifically, the way the movie thinks it's giving us a real treat), but most of what comes before it is lovely. It's masturbatory nostalgia, sure, but it's also an elegiac ramble from an artist who's no longer convinced that the world needs what he knows how to give.
(rentable on amazon)
15. Uncut Gems (dir. The Safdie Brothers)
Deeply stressful, and more than a little grating, but the Safdies' unrelenting symphony of gleeful bad choices won me over with its sheer ballsiness. Everyone talked about Adam Sandler, but we should all be talking about Idina Menzel's titanic high-heel parking lot shuffle.
(not available right now)
(I should say that, though we're only six in, you can imagine that everything I write from here on in is accompanied by increasingly high-pitched squealing.)
14. Sorry Angel (dir. Christophe Honoré)
A perfect, effortlessly modulated piece, the kind of movie I could have spent another 10 hours watching (how is this not in my top 10?). Honoré's delicate look at love on the margins, and all the stupid, tiny sacrifices people make just do make them, made me swoon, then cry, then swoon a little more.
(rentable on amazon)
13. Synonyms (dir. Nadav Lapid)
Things that are important: words, dicks, homoerotic tension, humming really loudly on the subway, Lebanese porn actresses, rivers, being a big strong man, national anthems, bad pasta, and buttholes. No movie I've ever seen moves, speaks, or thinks quite like Synonyms, a grenade strapped to a thesaurus and thrown onto a crowded street--shame that the last third works hard to throw out just a little bit too much of its boldness.
(rentable on amazon)
12. Booksmart (dir. Olivia Wilde)
God PLEASE give me more comedies, or movies in general, that take friendships between women (teenagers!) as seriously as this one does, with all the heart and nuance and genuine feeling that this one displays--while still being one of the funniest movies of the year. Beanie Feldstein and Kathryn Dever are great, obviously, but talk about an ensemble--everybody gets their big silly moment to shine.
(streaming on hulu, rentable on amazon)
11. Hustlers (dir. Lorene Scafaria)
A totally perfect thing--incisive in its portrayal of (potentially toxic) friendships, clear-eyed in its depiction of dancing and sex work, and probably the best fiction film ever made about the 2008 financial crisis. A beautifully balanced wonder that's funny, thrilling, upsetting, and sad in equal measure--and again, how is this not in my top 10?
(rentable on amazon)
10. Pain and Glory (dir. Pedro Almodovar)
Tender and lush, like dreaming about the ocean--it's so wonderful to see Almodovar working in his upper registers, because who can compete with him when he's doing his best? Pain and Glory is as rich and deeply felt as anything from the Pedro canon, with Antonio Banderas giving a career-best performance.
(rentable on amazon)
9. Parasite (dir. Bong Joon-Ho)
Somehow it feels like heresy to have something so universally regarded as low as #9, but here we are. And it should be universally regarded--no one can deny the dizzying craft it takes to keep a story this perilous moving as it trundles forwards on its spun glass stilts. The lion's share of praise has gone to the film's breathless and labyrinthine plot, its wire-tight editing, its nightmare homes and gardens design, and above all the direction, but I've got to single out the cast--the best ensemble of 2019, called on to play entire worlds without giving up their own games.
(rentable on amazon)
(And here I go, throwing brevity down the stairs! Eat shit brevity, I've got things to say. Go wait at the bottom of the stairs with all the other useless concepts like objective truth and balance.)
8. Marriage Story (dir. Noah Baumbach)
It's somewhat passé at this point to talk about this movie and balance, the way Marriage Story is more accurately called Marriage Stories, how the film sways in the wind between its two protagonists, both taking more and giving less than either would admit or believe. Everyone is dynamite here, though I might give the slight advantage to Johansson, or maybe Merritt Weaver, who feels like she's been teleported in from I Love Lucy but in exactly the right way. I laughed, I cried, Laura Dern acted like a sandwich lobster, and I got to see Julie Hagerty again (something that doesn't happen nearly enough)--what more does anyone need?
(streaming on netflix)
7. The Lighthouse (dir. David Eggers)
The kind of movie you need to go to church after--an extremely funny dark comedy until it's very suddenly not funny at all. This gay romp through the mist about lighthouse keepers and the lighthouses/mermaids they want to doink surprised me with its melodramatic wit (has there ever been a funnier aggrieved speech in all of cinema than Willem Dafoe's mid-movie curse because Robert Pattinson doesn't like his cooking, or a better response than '...fine, have it your way"?), and, it must be said, its filthy sexiness (R Patz is apparently at the absolute height of his charisma and power whilst covered in sweat and dirt, furiously masturbating to realistically rendered shark vulvas). Whatever it does--comedy, sex, mind-bending dreams, toxic bdsm friendships, seagull murder--it does with singular ferocity. I think we all wouldn't mind living an eternity chained to this movie's wall while seabirds eat our organs.
(rentable on amazon)
6. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (dir. Marielle Heller)
Leave it to Marielle Heller to take a deadly dull genre (the biopic) and refashion it into a communal therapy session in which the audience is actively invited to participate in the protagonist's own healing process. Only a terribly brave movie could have Tom Hanks reprise Mr. Rogers' famous 'let's take one whole minute to think about the people who are special to us' moment, and then have him look directly at the camera while the film pauses for a full minute. It's sheer insanity, and it's brilliant. This movie ripped me into little pieces, hinting at the kind of catharsis we all want to want, the kind that's beautiful to imagine, but a little fleeting and out of reach. Maybe the best ending of the year? In which everything we've seen--all of our desires to put Mr. Rogers on a pedestal--get dashed in one angry fist to the piano.
(not available yet)
5. Atlantics (dir. Mati Diop)
A phenomenal announcement from a debut filmmaker: whole worlds pushed against and through each other, resonating with the not-spark of stories that happen because they have to. Fascinated by the way the ocean looks this way--ugly, flat, unknowable, a listless, dull-eyed void standing between Now and Sometimes, or maybe Never. Such a beautiful and haunting movie, everything said in charred bed-sheets and broken handcuff chains and the eyes in the sea. There's passion and horror here, everything obstructed in gray lace and humidity.
(streaming on netflix)
4. The Farewell (dir. Lulu Wang)
One of the quietest, most understated (and underrated) movies of the year--a tapestry of all the quiet hurts people carry with them because they have to, or because they want to, or because any other choice just seems hollow. I'm astounded by the movie's ability to evoke character, everyone on the screen inferring a vast and unspoken life beyond the margins. Wang's framing is immaculate, as is her sense for knowing exactly what we need to see, and when. Everything exists together, jubilant contradictions jostling for attention. Think of the 'wedding' scene, that casually leapfrogs from comedy karaoke to farewell speeches to dizzy drinking games without breaking a sweat, which is how things are--everything just happens, and there's nothing to do but 'ha' it out the next morning.
(rentable on amazon)
3. Midsommar (dir. Ari Aster)
A ragged yawp to the sky, which doesn't give a shit about you, but, why not, will go ahead and yawp back. Ari Aster's peon to madness (or, I suppose, the deep and horrible sanity that comes from everything going insane) doesn't hold its punches--it's almost three hours of well-lit brutality, culminating in one of the most weirdly cathartic ritual murders I've ever seen. Midsommar is about release, whatever and however we find it. It doesn't hurt that said release is facilitated by the most undersung crafts of the year (those horrible folk paintings in the lodge! the may queen dress! that charming bear suit!), nor does it hurt that Aster is always quick to leaven the strangeness with humor. ("...I think I ate her pube," says one character, on being confronted with a very bizarre circumstance. "That sounds probably right," they reply, taking everything in stride.) It's beautiful, it's ugly, it's horrific, it's delightful, and it wants you to experience all of those at once. Plus it's a horror movie about grad students picking their dissertation projects, which, how is that only now in 2019 the subject of a horror movie?
(streaming on prime, rentable on amazon)
2. Little Women (dir. Greta Gerwig)
I wish everything in life were this gentle, generous, and warmly observed. Gerwig's primary conceit--ordering the film so that we see both younger and older characters at the same time--pays off in spades, giving the smallest and largest things the (littlest) women experience weight because we get to watch how they pay off years from now. This, inevitably, makes for a more melancholy and reflective Little Women than we tend to get--which is never a bad thing when you have Saoirse Ronan, aka The Best Face in All Cinema, to anchor your movie. But the whole cast gets to shine, as the film finds the time to care intimately about all of these people and their dreams, their lives--every March sister, their parents, their lovers, hell, even poor Chris Cooper across the way who just wants to be sad and cry on the stairs while listening to the piano. I can't even express how much I love the time this movie takes and the respect and kindness it affords every one of our characters. We need more things and people that are willing to look at everyone with a generous heart.
(in theaters)
1. One Cut of the Dead (dir. Shin'ichiro Ueda)
I know, this might surprise you, and honestly, it surprises me a little too. In a year as robust and fantastic as this one, how is it that the movie that takes the cake is the micro-budget horror comedy that got made because its cast and crew took a filmmaking seminar together and needed a final project? Well, that's how it is. Like I said, this is one of those infrequent years where I could never be sure what my favorite movie was (I still can't pick a winner from 2016), and this answer will probably change every time I'm asked. Maybe I picked this one because I simply had the most fun with it--and I did laugh at this movie harder than I have in...years? I'm honestly not sure when a movie last made me laugh this much. But just calling it 'the most fun' does a massive disservice to a hugely accomplished movie. I don't want to spoil too much, because much of the fun is watching a movie unfold that never wants to let you pin it down. But it is, among other things, a self-aware send-up of B movies, a flashy technical exercise (the first 34 minutes are one uninterrupted take, which soon-to-be Oscar winner 1917 only pretends to do), a mid-life crisis dramedy, and above all, a celebration of rolling up your sleeves and just making something, no matter what it is. And maybe that's what I want most this year--something warm and silly and clever that believes unfailingly in the power of making and doing and creating. Not that art is a magical solution for every problem, per se, but that the act of doing it is one of the most powerful tools we have for gleefully refuting the limitations that the world wants for us. And all of this folded up as love letter to trashy horror movies! It's like someone read my dream diary and then made the thing I didn't let myself want.
(streaming on shudder, rentable on amazon)
Well look at us go! I've only been working on this intermittently for ... 3-ish hours! If you've got more in you (and I can't imagine why you would, but perhaps you, like me, are committed to doing the worst thing whenever possible), I'm going to take a moment to catch my breath, and then jump into the best scenes and worst movies of the year.
(I'll try to link to the best scenes on YouTube, but no promises.)
10. Rebel Wilson, the Singing Nightmare Cat-Cats
Ok, so maybe 'best' is a big word here, but I couldn't let the day pass without talking a little bit about the horrendous nightmare phantasmagoria that is Cats. It's not best as in good, but best as in 'this is a movie you will never forget, despite your best efforts.' Just looking up clips for this movie made my brain reject its reality anew. And what better way to represent that horrific reality than the scene in which a digitally befurred Rebel Wilson eats little cockroach ladies and then unzips her own skin?
(Here's a taste (heh) of the whole scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7Uei5Qk9RM)
9. Would You Like to Dance?-Little Women
It's tough to distill all of this movie's charm and grace and warmth into one moment (and the movie itself kind of resists a 'one scene' category), but this scene of Jo and Laurie giddily courting each other at a dance made me grin from ear to ear, and still does.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x79u230bFU
8. Opening Dance-Climax
It may be deeply flawed in many ways, but Gaspar Noé's Climax is nothing if not bold, and it lets us know that right from the bat, dropping us into an mind-boggling extended dance number in which a bevy of context-less bodies do their best to contort, disjoint, and appear unreal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hwkacrln26o
7. Being Alive-Marriage Story
Who knows how powerful it is out of context, but as one of the emotional crescendos of the movie, Adam Driver's low-key and blearily felt rendition of Sondheim's 'Being Alive' is a knock-out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWengrlMpok
6. 'Show Yourself'-Frozen 2
I am such a sucker for Disney ballads every year. But how could I possibly turn down this gorgeously animated, to-the-rafters wail of self-discovery that melodramatic gay teens will be playing during their coming out for years to come? Shit always gets real when Elsa sings so hard she gets a costume change, and we're all powerless before it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiQbDk5V2yU (note: Frozen 2 spoilers abound if you haven't seen it yet)
5. Communal Crying-Midsommar
Our shell-shocked protagonist gets some .... bad news, and loses it. Then, in an unsettling but bizarrely empowering moment, the women of the cult community around her cry in rhythm with her, helping her confront her feelings by being them. It's wild stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTjxym-VpfQ (there are kind of spoilers, but it's all vague enough that you could watch it without knowing what's actually happening)
4. Enter Ramona-Hustlers
A star turn for the ages, and one hell of a character intro. Jennifer Lopez's introductory dance tells us everything we need to know about her, the world she lives in, and the world our main character doesn't.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJwYeAPH1Mg
3. Avengers...Assemble-Avengers: Endgame
(Avengers spoilers ahead) Look, I hate myself for this just as you hate me for having it here, but I am who I am, and who I am is ultimately a child who was *very* excited to watch all of his toys play together at the same time. But really--all I've ever wanted out of the comic movie craze was *one* scene that reminded me of The Death of Superman, in which the entire DC universe is all one page, the clarity and spectacle and weight of every possible narrative folding themselves down to one. And Endgame gave me that. So even though Disney is destroying the film industry as we know it, I've got to be grateful for this, at least.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBe3H8TCw5Q
2. Night Run-1917
1917 is probably overpraised by this point (boy is it not a movie that is going to wear the best picture winner mantle well), but credit where credit is due. When George MacKay wakes up to discover a Hieronymus Bosch fever dream waiting for him, all fire and brimstone and shifting shadows, we get one of the most jaw-dropping visual sequences of the year. (To quote a colleague/fellow movie lover: 'my eyes shot right out the back of my head.')
(Not on youtube yet, as it's still in theaters, but these two clips give a vague idea of some of the aesthetics at work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlbJZQQJ528 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jlqa_GCFfqE
1. A Minute of Silence-A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
Could it be anything else but this, a daring formal move and an emotional wallop all in one? Funny, just two days before I saw this movie, I taught Die Mörder sind unter uns in class, and we talked about how movies generally aren't brave enough to be silent. And then this came along! A whole minute of quiet, directly addressed to the viewer, in which we're all invited to spend a little time thinking together. The moment of the year, and I can only hope that 2020 will also have a minute as bold and beautiful as this one.
(Not on youtube either, but around 3.14 of this video talks about the scene briefly and shows a quick clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f18gDPOiEc)
And finally, the worst movies of the year! It's never great to dwell in negativity, and I do want these to be a celebration, but there's always a terrible and freeing pleasure in burning the proverbial bear costume. And don't worry, dear reader, because I am silly with bear costumes and am ready to torch them all.
5. Joker
I really did think about not having this on here, thinking that surely the ambition on display would place it above other, less accomplished movies. But nope, in the end that's what killed it. The worst thing about Joker is not that is so profoundly derivative of The King of Comedy (which is more or less the same movie) and Taxi Driver (for the aesthetic and edge), it's not that the way it treats women is hideous (though it is), or that it exploits discussions of mental illness (and equates them in the final monologue to how hard it is to be a white comedian who gets told what's funny and what isn't), and it's not even that the central ideologies are totally hollow, or don't even exist. The worst thing about Joker is that Joker is so goddamn convinced that it's a great movie. So instead of throwing something like Red Sea Diving Resort or Isn't it Romantic or Glass--all movies that are worse, at least cinematically--I've got Joker here because of how proud it is of itself, how much it believes in its own size.
4. Dark Phoenix
I've seen every X-men movie in theaters, but at what cost? A total mess from beginning to ending, made by and for people who couldn't care less if the entire franchise fell into the sea.
Now this year I'm doing something a bit unorthodox, in that I've got a three-way tie for first place. And they are:
1. The Lion King/Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker/Maleficent: Mistress of Evil
I thought about ranking these in degrees of horribleness, but why? They're all at the bottom for the same reason. Because they have no reason for being other than making money. Because the only guiding artistic principle was whatever would sate the lowest common denominator. Because all three are only interested in the viewers so much as their childhoods can monetized and sold back to them. Because all three represent the nadir of what filmmaking can be: something with all the personality--or less--of trading stocks. The only things that matter are the things that push the little numbers up or down. And this isn't the future I want. This is not why I fell in love with movies. And I'm frightened, I honestly am, that the Disney monopoly is eating everything in sight, that 8 out of 10 of the highest grossing movies of the year are Disney properties. It'd be scary even if they were putting every effort into making something other than a profit. But they're not, as demonstrated here. (Note: if you're rushing to the comments to assure me that all movies are made to make money--there's a difference between artists wanting to be paid for their art and content that is algorithmically produced to make a certain percentage.)
So I'm going to be an asshole and say this--if you're the kind of person who only goes to the theater for a Disney movie, then you're part of the problem. And it's not a matter of 'just let people enjoy what they enjoy,' because we're moving to a world where that doesn't happen. Hell, try going to a theater when Star Wars opens and see the variety you get (not to mention that Disney is forcing theaters to block-schedule its products, which means that fewer movies even get the chance to open).
And I'm part of the problem too. I always told myself that it was ok that I went to these movies in theaters, because I'm going to see everything else as well, but I'm not sure that's the case anymore. So I'll have to figure out if I can ethically see Disney movies in theaters--even if I love plenty of them, as evidenced by some of the things above. So we'll see.
Ok, that was obviously a very downer way to end the post, which is a shame, but Disney's got me legitimately spooked, and if you care about movies at all, you probably ought to be a little spooked as well. But that's enough of that! I'll be back tomorrow and the next day with more posts, but in the meantime: what did you think? What did I get wrong? What am I missing?
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