2018 Year End Report - An Introduction

I’m sitting here, after I’ve written all of the following pages (54) and words (34,000 and counting) and wondering just what I can say about the movie year that was 2018. I saw a lot of film this year (277 from this year), and trying to find some sort of common theme among them is impossible. Even among the best of the year – my own top 10 list – other than to say that for the most part they were dark films this year – full of pain and violence, injustice and racism and death – a lot of death. This makes a certain degree of sense of course – we are living in dark times right now, and filmmakers are reflecting that darkness back to us. For the most part though, these film aren’t nihilistic, even if they don’t offer much in the way of hope. Small victories become important in some of these films. Just outside of my top 10 was the most hopeful film I’ve seen in years – it broke my heart to cut it – but this really was a great year for movies.

 

It is always a great year for movies though. While how and where we watch them continue to change and evolve, if you cannot find plenty of films to love in a given year, it’s either because you don’t like movies very much, or else you aren’t casting your net wide enough to find those quality movies. With the further fracturing of distribution models, you can see a lot of great films even if you don’t live in a big city, or don’t like to go to the theaters very often. Two of the top 10 films of the year (according to me) were Netflix films – and they made/released several others than were almost as good – as well as resurrecting a supposedly lost film from one of cinema’s greatest directors. Yes, it kind of sucks that I had to watch the new films by the Coen Brothers or that lost film from Orson Welles on my TV instead of a movie theater (I did see Roma in a theater – at TIFF) – but increasingly I find myself defending rather than decrying Netflix. Yes, they have a lot of issues, and I would love it if they released more of their films into theaters (as they have done with Roma) – but it’s better to have them in the form than most people would watch them in anyway than not have them at all, right? Yes, in their conflict with Cannes this year, there was a lot of lofty words spoken by Netflix that don’t have a lot of backup to them if you dig just a little deeper – then again, the same was true of what Cannes said too, right? And I’m not going to call the company giving money to the Coens, Scoresese, Tamara Jenkins, Noah Baumbach, Alfonso Cuaron and Orson Welles the bad guy here – even if Netflix does make a lot of very silly, very bad movies as well.

 

Still of the 35 films (not including docs or animated films – which as always have their own list, unless one was good enough to crack the top 10 – and this year, they weren’t – although an animated film would have been VERY close to mine) that ranked as the best of 2018 – I saw all but five of them in a theater (one I did see on VOD when it came out I had a chance to see in a theater and missed it – but then again, one of the films I saw at TIFF 2017, was the only chance I would have had a chance to see it in a theater, which I did, so it evens out I suppose). Yes, an effort has to be made to see things in a theater – but I think that effort is worth it.

 

I am still compiling the top 10 lists from 650 critics/film buffs as I do every year – a kind of last minute check to make sure I’ve seen everything I should – and I’m almost done for 2018 (I basically just needs the lists from Film Comment). Of the top 50 there, I have missed but two – Abbas Kiarostami’s 24 Frames (which released on Criterion recently – although not apparently on iTunes) and Bing Liu’s Minding the Gap – which I believe played at the TIFF Lightbox for a week – the week I was at Disney with my family – and then hasn’t been seen in Canada since (if you wonder why I’m not more down on Netflix, it could be because the alternative is something like Hulu who made Minding the Gap – which has been available to stream in America since August – but nowhere in Canada. Who knows if I will ever be able to see it). The other 16 films on the top 100 list I have no seen include the just released Capernaum, the upcoming release Destroyer, a bunch of films that as far as I know were never released in Canada (Bisbee ’17, Western, Hale County This Morning This Evening, Monrovia Indiana, Dead Souls, Amazing Grace, A Bread Factory, The Green Fog, Thunder Road, I Am Not a Witch) and a trio of festival films awaiting real release this year (High Life, An Elephant Sitting Still, Long Day’s Journey Into Night). I most regret not being able to see many of the docs – my doc list this year isn’t terrific, but I have a feeling I’d like it more if I could have included titles like Minding the Gap, Bisbee ’17, Hale County or Monrovia, Indiana. Also, as a huge fan of both Guy Maddin and Vertigo, I really am dying to see The Green Fog. Lets’s hope that sooner or later, I can see them all.

 

So that’s it for another year. As always, what follows is admittedly overkill. By the end of the week, if you so choose, you can read about my favorite 35 films of the years, my favorite 5 animated films, favorite 10 docs, favorite 10 horror films, the 10 best directorial debuts, my ten most disappointing films, my ten worst films. And then the top 10 performances in each acting category, and ten best ensemble casts, and what the Oscar nominations would look like if I got to choose them. Oh, and my year in TV watching. Is that ridiculous? You bet. But I love it anyway. As always, I welcome feedback but encourage anyone who doesn’t like my list to go make their own list.