It's the last day of 2024 and it occurred to me that I've seen quite a few movies this month that I haven't even mentioned, and these include my favorite film of the year. So this post is a complete list of movies that I've seen at the theater, and some of the movies that I've seen for the first time that I caught at home on a streaming service.
Before I get into that, I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge my favorite movies of the year. Honorable mentions go to The Beekeeper, Lisa Frankenstein, Drive Away Dolls, Dune: Part Two, Love Lies Bleeding, Late Night With The Devil, Maxxxine, Longlegs, White Bird, Saturday Night, Smile 2, Here, and My Old Ass.
If I had to narrow it down to my favorite three movies of the year, it would be:
# 3 - Speak No Evil# 2 - The Substance# 1 - Nosferatu
There are a few movies from 2024 that I want to see but still haven't, so there's quite a few movies that I can't take into consideration for this list. The ones that immediately come to mind are Challengers and Anora, both of which have gotten a lot of favorable reviews. I'd also like to see Furiosa, Strange Darling, The Brutalist, The Outrun, Conclave, and Laroy Texas, and I'm sure there are a few others that I'm not thinking of or that I'm unaware of at the moment.
If I had a vote for Best Picture out of the movies that I have seen, I'd give it to Nosferatu. It's possible that there is a little recency bias at play here, but I think this takes horror to another level. If I hadn't seen Nosferatu, I'd vote for Here because it's about as close to a work of art that I've ever seen on the big screen. I'm not sure if there's a favorite this year. The nominations are going to be announced on January 17th. I expect that Wicked will probably be one of the contenders, but I'm not the right person to ask about its chances because I haven't seen it and have no interest in it at all.
Having said that, here are some of the movies that I watched for the first time this month:
High Fidelity has been on my list of movies that I've wanted to see since it was released in 2000. I enjoyed it, but I wasn't as crazy about it as many of the critics seem to be. The main character is one of the most unlikable protagonists that I've ever seen, and I can't really tell if the filmmakers intended the audience to root for this guy or to hope that he falls flat on his face. Either way, I've known people like this in my life and try like hell to avoid them. Jack Black absolutely steals every scene that he's in. He and Todd Louiso both deliver excellent performances that give the story the heart that is lacking in the overprivileged and hopelessly self-unaware Rob Gordon, played equally well by John Cusack.
That Thing You Do was released on October 4th, 1996. The title track from the movie soundtrack, which was a 60's style pop rock song with a catchy hook, was heavily played on television and on the radio for the latter half of the year. I was 16 years old at the time and firmly entrenched in my grunge / punk / alternative rock phase, and I rolled my eyes every time I heard it and wondered how long it would be before they'd stop playing it. Needless to say, I really didn't have much interest in seeing the flick that the song came from.
Fast forward twenty-eight years. I really don't mind this song anymore, and I actually kind of like it. It's not the sort of song that's going to find its way to my favorites playlist, but it makes me smile when I hear it. I've also come to appreciate Tom Hanks quite a bit over the years, and after seeing Here last month, That Thing You Do got bumped to the top of my list because it's one of his movies that I had never seen before.
I managed to go all these years without the plot of this movie being spoiled for me at all. I knew it was about a fictional band who had a hit song that played on the radio all the time in '96, and I knew that Tom Hanks was in it, but I didn't know anything about the story at all. Hell, I didn't even know that Liv Tyler was in it, and I had the biggest crush on her when I was a teenager.
Hanks and Tyler both delivered great performances, as did Tom Everett Scott, Johnathon Schaech, and everybody else in the cast for that matter. It's an incredible movie, and I found myself getting lost in the story and not wanting it to end by the time the credits rolled. I'm not sure if I would have been able to fully appreciate it back in 1996, but I wish I had given this one a shot a lot sooner than I did.
This movie felt like a bait and switch. For the weeks leading up to the release of Werewolves, my local Regal kept playing the trailer for a werewolf movie that looked pretty interesting. I thought this was that movie, but as it turns out, the trailer was for a movie called Wolf Man which won't be released until January 17th.
It didn't turn out to be a disappointing experience though. Werewolves may not be one of my favorite movies of the year, but it's a solid horror flick. The story takes place in a world in which everyone in the world discovered one year ago that they are a werewolf. The transformation took place on the night of a supermoon, and it only affected people who were touched by the moonlight. Those who turned into werewolves became ruthless killing machines who caused widescale death and destruction, but they turned back into human beings the next morning when they were exposed to sunlight. The movie begins one year later. No one has transformed into a werewolf since the supermoon event, but there's another supermoon coming.
It's a different take on werewolf lore that felt a little bit like a zombie movie and a little bit like The Purge, and it wasn't bad at all. If you're having a werewolf movie night, this would make a nice addition to the playlist.
I'm reluctant to say too much about Get Away because it had a few fun twists that I didn't see coming and I don't want to spoil it for anybody. It stars Nick Frost, who I remember best from his co-starring roles in Shaun Of The Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World's End. The film begins with he and his family traveling to a remote Swedish island that is preparing for a festival based on their dark past. The way that the story plays out made me think that the pitch for this film could have been "what if The Wicker Man was part of the Cornetto Trilogy". I'd recommend this one to just about anyone who isn't overly squeamish.
The Craft: Legacy caught me off guard. I had completely forgotten that Blumhouse made a sequel to The Craft. It was released on October 28th, 2020 in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic; just a couple of months before the first vaccines became available to the public. I came across it while I was scrolling through Kanopy looking for something to watch, and it was a pleasant surprise. You never know what you're going to get when it comes to legacy sequels, but this one was made with heart and it did a good job expanding on the first story. Its inclusion of a transgender girl as one of the members of the coven was done in a respectful manner that didn't hide or shame her character or the actress who played her in any way, but also without focusing so much on that aspect of her character to make her one-dimensional. Cailee Spaeny, Gideon Adlon, Lovie Simone, and Zoey Luna each deliver excellent performances as the coven featured in the film, and David Duchovny nails it as the film's antagonist.
The end of the movie has a twist that I didn't see coming. It sets up what could be a pretty interesting third movie in the series, but I haven't heard any word that this is going to happen. I hope that it does, and that this movie finds its audience.
Y2K isn't the movie that I was expecting after having seen the trailer, and it was a lot less serious of a story than I've come to expect from an A24 film, but it was still a fun movie with standout performances from Julian Dennison and Lachlan Watson. This film also gave me a new appreciation for Fred Durst. I wasn't a fan of Limp Bizkit at any point in my life and that has not changed, but this movie shows that Durst has a sense of humor about himself and you've got to respect that.
If we still lived in a world of video rental stores and folks watching movies on cable television, I would say that Y2K would find its audience after it was released on home video and it would go on to become a cult classic. Movies are delivered primarily through streaming these days and their availability is shuffled between different subscription services like a game of three card monte, so I'm not really even sure if that sort of thing is likely to happen anymore. I hope that it does reach its audience though. It's not the kind of movie that I'd recommend to everyone, but it's blend of late 90's nostalgia and zany comedy is a fun experience.
The Divide was released in January 2012, and I was completely unaware of it at the time. When I look back on things, 2011 was by far the most hectic and transitional twelve months of my life. That whirlwind carried over through the first half of the following year, so I didn't really take notice of too many movies that were coming out unless they were too big not to see. I became aware of The Divide over the past few years after hearing it mentioned on some of the WhatCulture videos that I've seen.
The movie is about people in an apartment building who survive an atomic bomb by locking themselves in the basement and the ways that their humanity devolves as time passes. It's a premise that I usually find to be interesting. I don't mind a movie that's dark and depressing if it's done well, but this movie didn't work on me at all. After seeing it, I came across a review by Nigel Floyd who wrote that the film resembled "an indulgent actors workshop that has spun out of control", which is absolutely spot on. It's not a horrible movie, but I have no desire to see it again and I can't really think of anybody that I'd recommend it to.
Affliction is a neo-noir crime drama that was released nationwide in December 1998. It's one of those movies that I've heard good things about for years, but never found the time to sit down and watch it for myself. It's very good, but I'm not sure if I got into it as much as some of the praise for the film that I've read. This might have worked better on me if I saw it on the big screen with no distractions.
Kanopy is one of my favorite streaming services because I find a lot of things on there that I've never heard of at all. One that caught my eye this month was a black and white French Canadian film from 2018 called Charlotte A Du Fun. The reason that it caught my eye was that it was listed on the service by it's American title: Slut In A Good Way. Go ahead and judge me if you want to, but it would have caught your eye too.
I prefer to go into a movie completely blind, so I clicked on it and expected that it was going to be something along the lines of the American Pie movies. It's definitely a sex comedy, so that expectation wasn't totally off base, but I was very happy to find that it's also a very thoughtful and sex-positive film that tells a good story without taking itself too seriously. It explores the sense of judgment and double standards that exists between men and women, and it shuts them down in a way that is light-hearted without ever feeling like it's preaching to the audience.
It didn't surprise me to learn that this film was written and directed by women (Catherine Léger and Sophie Lorain). It's not prudish or conservative in the slightest as it presents sexuality as something that should be enjoyed and it does so better than any movie that I can think of. Most of the sex scenes that I've seen in other movies are either played for laughs or are presented from a childish frat boy perspective - as if the director was trying to replicate a scene from a porno flick while still maintaining an R rating. That's not what's going on in Charlotte A Du Fun at all. The sex scenes are just a few seconds long and don't show any nudity. In fact, I don't think there was any nudity in this movie at all. More importantly than that, they show Charlotte (played by Marguerite Bouchard) as happy and smiling. After years of seeing sex scenes in movies that felt like they were pandering to the lowest common denominator in the male audience, it was refreshing to see it presented from a female perspective.
I highly recommend this movie. All of the performances were excellent, and it tells a good story with an ending that had me smiling and laughing along with the characters. The version that I watched had French dialogue with English subtitles. I'm not sure if a dubbed version exists, but even if it does, I recommend sticking with the subtitles.
Three days before Christmas, we got to see National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation on the big screen at our local Regal Cinema. This is a holiday classic and probably my favorite Christmas movie of all time, so I'll go to see it any chance that I get. In fact, this is the second year in a row that we got to see it on the big screen during the holiday season. We saw it last year at the Kirby Center with Chevy Chase in attendance for a Q&A after the film.
I'm a little bummed that I didn't notice that they showed Elf and A Christmas Story earlier in the month because I would have gone to see them too.
Nosferatu exceeded my expectations in every way. I was pretty confident that I was going to enjoy it, but everything about it absolutely blew me away. It was a bummer that Anya Taylor-Joy had to pull out of the film due to scheduling conflicts, but Lily-Rose Depp gave an incredible performance as Ellen Hutter. Bill Skarsgård was fantastic as Count Orlock and Nicholas Hoult was every bit as good in the role of Ellen's husband, but the real standout was Hollywood legend Willem Dafoe as Professor Von Franz, who absolutely knocked it out of the park.
I'm sure that plenty of people would disagree with me, but I think this is one of the greatest horror movies of all time. I can't rule out recency bias as a factor here, but if I had to pick my favorite film of 2024, it would be Nosferatu. The atmosphere of this film is so beautiful that it just pulls you into the story and the world that it's being told in. It's the kind of movie that absolutely should be seen in the dark and on the big screen with no distractions. If you have any interest in horror at all, or even if you're not a big horror fan but are the type of person who enjoys an excellent movie that puts the outside world on pause and engulfs you from start to finish, I strongly recommend going to see this in the theater while it's still in.
The last film that I saw in theaters in 2024 was also by far the worst of the lot by a country mile. The poster for this movie immediately made me think that this wasn't the kind of thing that I'd have any interest in. However, I read the description which mentioned a nuclear war and a group of people who are trying to survive in the aftermath, and I thought that maybe I was guilty of judging a book by its cover.
I knew I made a mistake about two seconds into the movie. It began with a pretentious message on the screen that was something to the effect of "this film has been approved by Angel Studios". My first thought was "who the hell is Angel Studios", which was quickly followed by "what kind of jackass studio puts up a message about how they approve of their own film".
So, this is a Christian right wing / doomsday prepper propaganda piece which is thinly disguised as a real movie. It's the kind of thing that would appeal to your creepy uncle who watches Newsmax and lectures you about the gold standard when they're not listening to talk radio. Homestead has zero redeeming qualities to anyone who doesn't fit this mold. The acting is at the level of a daytime television soap opera. It would be offensive if it wasn't so damned stupid, and the message that it has to share serves only as a reminder of why decent human beings avoid people like the characters in this film. The fact that my local Regal theater booked this piece of trash while not bothering to give any screen time at all to hit films like The Substance and Anora is making me wonder if Regal Unlimited is worth keeping anymore.
I made it about an hour and walked out just after the scene where the evil local politician visited the compound with a threatening message about taxes... because there's nothing more evil than the government and taxes, right? I ended up stopping at Gennaro's to pick up a cheese pizza and a calzone. They have an arcade machine, and I had a little 80's moment on New Years Eve while I was waiting for my food to be ready because I got to play Pac Man in an old school pizza parlor while Drive by R.E.M. played on the radio.
When I got home with the pizza and calzone, my wife suggested that we watch Red One since it's now available to stream on Amazon Prime, which made me very happy because it gave me the opportunity to end the year on a much more positive note.
Red One is actually still in theaters. We had said a couple of times that we were going to see it, but for one reason or another, we didn't make it out to the theater to see it before Christmas, and we had both kind of forgotten about it afterward. I'm kind of sad that we didn't see this on the big screen because it was a fun movie. It's not the kind of thing that I'd call an instant holiday classic or a movie that I'd want to make a tradition to watch every holiday season, but it's a hell of a lot better than the reviews would led me to believe and a more enjoyable experience than a lot of other recent Christmas movies that I've seen.
The new year starts tomorrow, and it's going to be a year where I put this Christmas present from my friend Cary to good use. It's a 52 week long exercise to watch one movie per week that you haven't seen before and record your thoughts about it in this journal. The choice of movie is up to you, but you're given a prompt each week that helps narrow down the choice. The first week challenge is to watch a film that has won Best Picture. I'm going to keep a record of these movies on here as well. This should be a lot of fun!
