2023--The Year's Movies In Review

Glass Onion	Rian Johnson	2022
Airplane!	Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker	1980	rewatch
High Anxiety	Mel Brooks	1977	rewatch
The Glass Key	Stuart Heisler	1942
Radio On	Christopher Petit	1979
Johnny Dangerously	Amy Heckerling	1984	rewatch
If These Walls Could Sing	Mary McCartney	2022	documentary
Yes, Madam!	Corey Yuen	1985
Royal Warriors	David Chung	1986
The Matrix Resurrections	Lana Wachowski	2021
Magnificent Warriors	David Chung	1987
Police Story 3: Supercop	Stanley Tong	1992
Loving Highsmith	Eva Vitija	2022	documentary
Everything Everywhere All At Once	Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert	2022
Phantom Lady	Robert Siodmak	1944
The Death of Stalin	Armando Iannucci	2017
Danger: Diabolik	Mario Bava	1968
The Astro-Zombies	Ted K. Mikels	1968
The Heroic Trio	Johnnie To	1993	rewatch
Executioners	Johnnie To and Ching Siu-tung	1993	rewatch
Dune	David Lynch	1984	rewatch
Inland Empire	David Lynch	2006
Crimes of Passion	Ken Russell	1984
Young Frankenstein	Mel Brooks	1974	rewatch
Batman	Leslie H. Martinson	1966	rewatch
Operation Mincemeat	John Madden	2021
King of New York	Abel Ferrara	1990
Eight Hours of Terror	Seijun Suzuki	1957
Quadrophenia	Franc Roddam	1979
Lady Vengeance	Park Chan-wook	2005
Run Lola Run	Tom Tykwer	1998	rewatch
The Night of the 12th	Dominik Moll	2022
Green For Danger	Sidney Gilliat	1946
It Always Rains on Sunday	Robert Hamer	1947
Odd Man Out	Carol Reed	1947
Oppenheimer	Christopher Nolan	2023
Showgirls	Paul Verhoeven	1995
Obsession	Edward Dmytryk	1949
Le Salaire de la peur [The Wages of Fear]	Henri-Georges Clouzot	1953
Ghost In the Shell	Mamoru Oshii	1995	rewatch
Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' on Heaven's Door	Shinichirō Watanabe	2001	rewatch
Knightriders	George Romero	1981
Pee-wee's Big Adventure	Tim Burton	1985	rewatch
Vanishing Point	Richard C. Sarafian	1971
Knife In The Water	Roman Polanski	1962
Midnight Cowboy	John Schlesinger	1969
Insomnia	Erik Skjolsbjærg	1997
The Big Heat	Fritz Lang	1953	rewatch
La piscine	Jacques Deray	1969
House of Usher	Roger Corman	1960
Duel	Steven Spielberg	1971
Sorcerer	William Friedkin	1977
The Day After Trinity	Jon Else	1980	documentary
The Pit and the Pendulum	Roger Corman	1961
The Deer Hunter	Michael Cimino	1978
The Haunted Palace	Roger Corman	1963
Lake Mungo	Joel Anderson	2008	rewatch
Flesh For Frankenstein	Paul Morrissey	1973
Stop Making Sense	Jonathan Demme	1984/2023	rewatch
Exorcist III	William Peter Blatty	1990
In the Mouth of Madness	John Carpenter	1994	rewatch
The Green Knight	David Lowery	2021
The Cocoanuts	Robert Florey and Joseph Santley	1929
Two-Lane Blacktop	Monte Hellman	1971
The Addiction	Abel Ferarra	1995
Blood For Dracula	Paul Morrissey	1974
The Italian Job	Peter Collinson	1969	rewatch
Nimona	Nick Bruno and Troy Quane	2023
Nightmare Alley	Edmund Goulding	1947
The Beguiled	Don Siegel	1971
The Quick and the Dead	Sam Raimi	1995	rewatch
Suspiria	Dario Argento	1977
Eyes of Laura Mars	Irvin Kershner	1978
Dream Scenario	Kristoffer Borgli	2023
The Holdovers	Alexander Payne	2023
Phantom of the Paradise	Brian De Palma	1974
Lady In the Lake	Robert Montgomery	1947
Repeat Performance	Alfred L. Werker	1947
Five Easy Pieces	Bob Rafelson	1970
Body Snatchers	Abel Ferarra	1993
Thirteen Women	George Archainbaud	1932
High Anxiety	Mel Brooks	1977	rewatch
Gremlins	Joe Dante	1984	rewatch
Poor Things	Yorgos Lanthimos	2023
I Wouldn't Be In Your Shoes	William Nigh	1948
A Hard Day's Night	Richard Lester	1964	rewatch

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, it was really the movies that got me logging my media consumption, since I realized I'm not always remembering if I've actually seen something simply from a title, plot summary, or cast and crew.

It doesn't help that movies are, let's call it an "iterative medium," by which I'm trying to convey that because of the way movies are produced, most movies are adaptations of other movies or works in other media, and many are sequels or episodes in franchises (and have been going back to the early years of Hollywood).  I have, just by way of example, a kind of mental blinker re: The Glass Key (1942), which I logged this year as a movie I've definitely seen, but have I seen the 1935 version?  And then I also know for a fact I've read the book at some point, and I'm pretty sure I've listened to one of the old radio adaptations of the book or movie, and it doesn't enhance my personal clarity on the topic that my favorite Coen Brothers movie (and one of my all-time faves generally) liberally borrows from all of the previous.

It confuses me every time it shows up in my recommendations, but at least this year I made a note of watching it.

The format I used for logging these, I guess I should mention, is title, director, year of release, and then sometimes a note re: whether it was a rewatch or was a documentary.  The list doesn't include any short films I watched or rewatched, and it doesn't include any series, though the way that films come out these days it can feel a fine line between whether something is a movie or a TV show; I went with my gut.

I also logged things every time I watched or rewatched them.  At the beginning of the year, visiting my Dad, we rewatched (or I rewatched it--I think it was his first time) Mel Brooks' last good movie, High Anxiety (no, I don't care if you liked Spaceballs or Men In Tights; I'm sorry if I'm yucking your yum and I'm trying to do less of that these days, but those movies are bad but it's okay if you like them anyway, okay?); near the end of the year, Kat and I rewatched it (I think she'd seen it before, too, but it had been a long time).  I'm not sure if that's the only repeat; it might be.

Viewing-wise it was also an interesting year because I had no urge whatsoever to go to any of the conglomerate-owned Cineramas or Multiplexes or whatever, aging and poorly cleaned and staffed by teenagers who aren't being paid enough to care and really shouldn't be faulted for that; and yes, it's hard not to be snarky about that kind of viewing experience.  This is one of the things we don't talk about much when talking about what's going on with the movie business, the fact that seeing a movie in the theatre has, despite all the talk of "magic" when the lights go down, commonly been perceived as a miserable experience most of my life: sticky things on the floor, terrible seats, expensive tickets, overpriced concessions, people talking in the theatre, etc., etc.  It's not surprising lots of people have decided it's just nicer to watch a feature film in the living room.  But I did get out to see some things in a theatre anyway: the Charlotte Film Society opened up an indie arthouse just a few minutes from us, showing a few new releases (I saw Oppenheimer, Poor Things, The Holdovers, and Dream Scenario there, as well as the new reissue of Stop Making Sense) as well as the expected foreign films (for instance The Night of the 12th) and old films/revivals (I finally saw Two-Lane Blacktop and Five Easy Pieces there, on the big screen).

Everything else was watched at home, or in somebody's home in a few cases (we watched Gremlins at the Airbnb my brother-in-law and his family rented when they were in town for Christmas).  I made a resolution sometime in the early days of the year to try to use our Criterion subscription more often, and that became even more doable post-retirement.

A thing that follows from the last few paragraphs is that, no, I didn't see many big films (unless you count Oppenheimer) this year and I pretty much took a pass on franchises.  It probably makes me look snootier than I really am: the truth is that I just have a great deal of franchise fatigue with Marvel and Star Wars right now (and the DC films all look terrible and get mostly bad reviews), and so even if I was sort of interested in something like The Marvels, that fatigue and the lack of enthusiasm for going to a big theatre conspired to make those movies soft passes; I just never got around to them because it just didn't seem like it was worth the modest effort, and I haven't gotten around to them on Disney+ either because there were other things I'd wanted to catch up on a bit more.  (There are movies I finally saw this year, including The Deer Hunter and Quadrophenia that have been on my watchlist since high school).

It may speak to my superhero fatigue that the two comic book superhero movies that the two I found time for were Batman (1966) and Danger: Diabolik (1968), two campy, silly, garishly-colored, pop art movies that didn't take themselves the least bit seriously and have often been mocked over the last five and a half decades even though they're so obviously meant to be comedies mocking them seems a bit pointless when you've actually seen them as what they are.

One other note: just about every month, Kat and I streamed The Mads Are Back, Frank Conniff's and Trace Beaulieu's monthly riffs of bad movies, and I think there was at least one other movie riffing thing Kat and I went to this year (my uncertainty is because of how 2022 and 2023 bleed together); anyway, I didn't include them in the list because they're presented with some editing and you're not watching the riffed versions for the movie but for the snarky comments and jokes.

Anyway, that's 2023 in movies.  I may do a post or posts with any further thoughts I have about some of these.  We'll see.  (I nearly wrote a post after seeing Five Easy Pieces, because I didn't really like it very much; maybe that'll still happen now.)

Anyway, Happy New Year, and we'll see what we see in 2024!