S&A 2020 Favourites Movies

      

Because 2020 was such a trash fire of a year, I got to watch a lot of movies.  Too Many movies, so many I started a Podcast  Schlock & Awe.  Something I never thought I was capable of, and to be honest I'm still not sure.  But here we are.  It's been an amazing outlet at the very least, and thank you to the support I have received, it was more than I ever expected.  So to accompany my best of list, I recorded an experiment.  Creating two Triple Features.  The first a Triple of  movies from 2020, and another Triple from first time Discoveries.  And it maybe incredibly shaky already, but here's hoping for a better 2021.

 

10 - Soul, dir Pete Docter

    It happens often.  You think you have you top 10 sorted for the year, and then you see the new Pete Docter movie and everything is thrown up into the air.  I am fully aware Soul is my I've just seen it, haven't had time to process it yet, so I like it way more than I would've if I had seen it in July movie.  But doesn't change that Soul is my number 10.  I wont say a lot about it because it is featured in the Body Swap Triple featured on the Schlock and Awe Podcast.  But I very much enjoyed Soul. 

9 - The Personal History of David Copperfield, dir Armando Iannucci

    I love Armando Iannaucci and I love Charles Dickens.  And you can feel Iannucci's love for Dickens in every frame and and every piece of dialogue.  This makes The Personal History of David Copperfield feel like a very personal endeavor for Iannaucci.  This is a celebration of Britain, in all it's shapes and colours.  As possible hero of this story David Copperfield, played charmingly by Dev Patel, Innaucci litters the movie with more than one national treasure.  Hugh Laurie, Benedict Wong, Tilda Swinton, Peter Capaldi, even Paddington himself Ben Wishaw in a delightful rendition of Uriah Heap.  Iconic actors often playing iconic roles about the seems of British Society.  I was utterly charmed by The Personal History of David Copperfield.  It's just a delight.

8 - Sound of Metal, Darius Marder

    There were murmurs and rumbles of Darius Marder's directorial debut before it landed on Prime.  Sound of Metal is a movie that throws a big swing and lands with a hefty punch.  Even though on reflection, The Sound of Metal shouldn't have come from left field, the nature of 2020, it felt like it did.  Riz Ahmed gives an astounding performance as a drummer suddenly loses his hearing, and everything he has built around him starts to crumble.  The Suddenness of this does not give you time to adjust, so like Ahmed you are struggling to reestablish how you watch the movie over all.  It's a neat trick and really effective.  

    The sound design feels almost experimental, it's the sound design that marks each act of the movie, and it's also the same sound design that marks Ahmed's physical and emotional response to the world suddenly changing around him.  Darius Marder is constantly making the best use of Ahmed large eyes as they are constantly darting around trying his best to adjust to this new world he has been plunged into.  The Sound of Metal is not a quiet movie, even though it looks on first blush like one.  More than anything it is about being able to live with yourself, even when everything around you has been stripped away.

7 - Palm Springs, dir Max Barbakow

    Palm Springs is the best kind of lazy afternoon movie.  And I didn't even watch it on a Sunday.  It has a breezy attitude that is hard not to love.  First time director Max Barbakow takes the now typical Time Loop Movie blends the colours more and more existential, for which this genre is known to be existential.  

    Palm Springs has one of my favorite ensemble casts of 2020: Adam Sandberg, J.K Simmons, Meredith Hagner, Peter Gallagher and his eye brows are round out everything nicely.  Each character gets a little moment that is memorable and a touchstone.  But really, the movie belongs to Cristin Milioti who is brilliant.  Milioti is able to create an amazing character study of some one sitting in their own self hatred.  The Time Loop genre is an effective metaphor for this.

  

6 - The Wolf of Snow Hollow, dir Jim Cummings

    I liked Jim Cumming's directorial feature debut; but I love his sophomore effort in The Wolf of Snow Hollow.  If feels like he brings up the pent up aggression from Thunder Road and now is able to bounce off other people and things, not just wanted at the world in general.  Robert Foster (in this final screen role) and Riki Lindhome (who I am beginning to love as a character actor) are great and add more depth to the movie over all.  The snow bound town that is trapped not only with a probable Werewolf but also with  Jim Cumming's Deputy and his ennui makes for a compelling and funny movie.  Every single time Cummings gets irate whenever some one brings up the notion there might be a Werewolf gets funnier each time it happens.  Mainly because every time he does Cummings, is slowly control of the situation.

    Cummings really leans into the comic tragic that was also in Thunder Road.  Though, I cannot wait to see what he does next.

5 - The Mortuary Collection, dir Ryan Spindell

    The Year of 2020 may have been a general shit fire, but Australia finally got Shudder.  And as a country we raised our classes and said Cheers Mate.  I've had a lot of fun with Shudder, it just has a lot of Indie Horror I tend to respond to.  So getting to see Ryan Spindell's Anthology The Mortuary Collection was a joy.  Pure Joy.  I love how The Mortuary Collection feels of from the same piece.  But when you get Clancy Brown to be your horror host in your wrap around, it's hard not to.  However, there is a depth to Mortuary the made me want to come back to it again.  With each story that Clancy Brown tells, the more it ups the anti and the gag.  Instead of stopping and starting like some Anthologies - Mortuary Collection moves.  My favourite Anthologies tend to having a novelistic feeling to them, like The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, it just gives it more depth and texture.  And as Brown and Catlin Custer egg each other one for bigger stories, it does have that quality.

4 - Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, dir George C. Wolfe

    Ma Rainey came as a surprise, it really was a shot in the arm in terms of 2020 Movies.  Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is a hungry movie, you can feel it gnawing on the bone.  An adaption of the August Wilson Play of the same name, it feels like director George C. Wolfe captures the energy of the original script by letting his actors attack it.  For me at least, a play feels like it is the medium that sits in between film and literature; a visual medium where by in large (or more likely me just making it up, cause I know nothing about The Theater) characters speak their inner monologue.  And Ma Rainey is all inner dialogue.  The pressure cooker that is a Recording Studio in a Chicago Summer is a pressure cooker for the insecurities, fears, exploitation and racism that Ma Rainey's band members face. No escape and no change from yourself or of how people treat and disrespect you.

    Ma Rainey will mostly be remembered for it being Chadwick Boseman's last on screen performance.  It's a bittersweet watch in this respect, Boseman feels like he's ramping up not winding down.  However for me, it's Viola Davis who picks up the movie places it in her bosom and saunters away with the movie.  There is a way Davis drinks a bottle of Coke that we mortals can only aspire to.  I doubt there isn't a better more glorious Diva Moment.

3 - Possessor, dir Brandon Cronenberg 

    I cover Possessor on Double Triple Episode above.  But this dreamy like body swap movie is very much my jam.  And Brandon has taken Dad's mantel and ran with it.

2 - Corpus Christi, dir Jan Komasa

    If it wasn't for Soul, Corpus Christi would have been part of the 2020 Body Swap Double Triple.  Bartosza Bielenia plays a young man who upon leaving a Juvenile Facility pretends to be a visiting Priest rather than serving his parole.    

    Corpus Christi and Bartosz Bielenia's central performance hit me like a ton of bricks; it's a quietly devastating and unassuming movie about trying not only change who you are, coming to terms with past actions and mistakes.  Jesus washing your feet clean as it were.  Corpis Christi is a deep pool of a movie, as Bielenia gets to know the town he has found himself charged with, he discoveries that it is in grief from an accident that killed six of their children.  And as Bielenia becomes more interconnected and is accepted into the town's confidence, the more he involves himself and projects his own guilt onto the accident.  It's an emotionally complex movie, that is digging into faith. forgiveness, class, organized religion, fate, grief.  It's a truly wonderful movie.  Plus one the more better just dancing in the backyard moments I have seen in a while.  I mean I freaken loved it, Corpus Christi and it is my number two.

1 - First Cow, dir Kelly Reichardt

    It's official, I 've been completely sucked into the Kelly Reichardt fan club.  I may be some time.

    Every movie I've seen from Reichardt I get into a state of dreamy bliss, and I start to imagine a quiet life in the mountains, communing with nature, singing with birds and meditating to a babbling brook.  And Kelly Reichardt movies are usually about how hard it is to live in these environments, yet she is so good - I sill see it as a possible life style.  Her movies tend to be beautiful and hypnotic.  So yes, I liked First Cow quite a bit.  Excuse me while I go pack - I now intend to disappear into the foliage of the North West.  I just want to live in First Cow.  

    Westerns do not get as green as First Cow.  You can feel the chill from the movie from rain drops and morning dew falling from the leaves.  First Cow is a movie that does so much with such a simple and straight forward movie.  Set in Oregon in the 1820s, Colonization has only touched the area, quickly put together shacks are the other structure of the town that John Magaro and Orion Lee inhabit.  Of course this all changes when the titled First Cow arrives.  Our First Cow represents, farming industry, immigration, colonization.  So when Magaro and Lee (in two of my favourite performances of the year decide to steal First Cow's milk to start their own make shift bakery.  One of my favourite moments of film in 2020 is First Cow's owner Toby Jones tasting one of Magaro and Orion's treats and with a perfect dreamy face tells the, how it's a taste of not.  Not knowing that the boys stole the milk from his First Cow in the first place.  It's the perfect illustration Class vs Capitalism vs The American Dream.  Because Reichardt's movie seems so intimate and small, so do the stakes, but they are not, they are everything.  

    First Cow was a big cool glass of water on a hot day.  It's magnificent.  And it's my favourite movie of the year.

 

Special Mentions

Shirley, dir Josephine Decker

Freaky, dir Christopher Landon

Underwater, dir William Eubank

The Old Guard, dir Gina Prince-Bythewood

Hamilton, dir Thomas Kail