2022 Movie Harvest

And now to line up the movies in a neat little column. As I do every year, I'm ranking all the year's movies I've seen from worst to best. I saw twenty-four new movies in 2022, which is more than usual for me, but there are still a few key films I missed. I really wanted to see Black Panther 2 but an English audio version wasn't playing at a convenient time for me. When it finally comes to Disney+, I'll watch it and come back and plug it into the appropriate spot. But here's what I did see:

24. Chip 'N Dale: Rescue Rangers (my review, Wikipedia entry)

Fans of the original TV series, and of older Disney films and TV series, will find a movie that spits in their eyes and says, "You're welcome."

23. The Seed (my review, Wikipedia entry)

A self conscious imitation of low budget '70s horror cinema, it comes off more as a cheap imitation of more prestigious pastiches by Tarantino and Eli Roth.

22. The Divine Protector: Salt Mistress Begins (Wikipedia entry)

An inoffensive fantasy adventure movie with cheap cgi.

21. Strange World (my review, Wikipedia entry)

The kind of puzzling miscalculation that could only come from a creative team locked in a sound-proof bubble.

20. Thor: Love and Thunder (my review, Wikipedia entry)

The great disappointment of 2022, Taika Waititi, who so deftly handled humour and drama with the previous Thor film, delivered something that totally fumbled on tone.

19. Lightyear (my review, Wikipedia entry)

It's not funny enough to be a comedy and not exciting enough to be an action space adventure. This is another example of a story pulled apart by the conflicting motives of its makers.

18. Glass Onion (my review coming soon, Wikipedia entry)

Daniel Craig grows more charming, and more like Columbo, as Rian Johnson's own super detective. An entertaining cast of supporting characters are introduced with affection that shows Johnson may be softening in his ideological zealotry. Unfortunately, the ending is silly and illogical but presented like the clever solution to a problem.

17. Karada Sagashi (my review, Wikipedia entry)

This Groundhog Day meets It story taps into a young generation hooked on online gaming. Parts of the film are too artificial to work but other parts give us a decent teen drama.

16. Ushikubimura (my review, Wikipedia entry)

A charismatic star and a first act filled with effective supernatural menace are sadly undermined by excessive exposition in the middle act. The third act goes through the motions but all the tension is gone by then.

15. Prey (my review, Wikipedia entry)

In this age of political correctness, I applaud the filmmakers for not allowing ethnic authenticity to stop them from casting the actress they wanted in the lead. There are some fun Rambo-ish moments in the film and the new Predator design is nice but, sadly, most of the action sequences are diminished by bad cgi and the star's hairstyle.

14. Incantation (my review, Wikipedia entry)

A fun, impressively detailed, horror film. It's too reliant on jump scares but the work the filmmakers put into creating a phony cult deserves praise.

13. Barbarian (my review, Wikipedia entry)

A first half built on excellent tension is followed by a second half with many effective qualities. The usual political influences drag the film down a bit but not as much as certain logical inconsistencies in the story. Still, when it works, it works really well.

12. The Batman (my review, Wikipedia entry)

This is the first Batman movie that really doesn't try to push the envelope in any way, staying within the bounds of what Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan proved was effective. It's remarkable that we're so used to filmmakers taking risks with such a prominent IP, The Batman can feel like a bit of a letdown, but, really, it achieves acceptability.

11. Top Gun: Maverick (my review, Wikipedia entry)

A softball, low-stakes adventure story is elevated tremendously by terrific action sequences.

10. Everything Everywhere All at Once (my review, Wikipedia entry)

An inventive concept told in such an engaging way can't be completely diminished by its disappointing finale. Michelle Yeoh is a great lead in a great role here.

9. Pinocchio (my review, Wikipedia entry) Guillermo Del Toro's visually astonishing take on the suddenly popular story isn't nearly as interesting as his take on Nightmare Alley last year. Still, it's a remarkable achievement.

8. Avatar: The Way of Water (my review, Wikipedia entry)

Another visually unique film but what James Cameron achieves is something like a once in a lifetime experience. Even the weak screenplay hardly seems to matter. There are parts of this movie that are absolutely glorious.

7. Turning Red (my review, Wikipedia entry)

A delightful, John Hughes-ish teen comedy that brilliantly transmutes the discomforts and wonders of coming of age.

6. Emily the Criminal (my review coming soon, Wikipedia entry)

A satisfying crime fantasy movie of the Breaking Bad mould. Aubrey Plaza is a scrappy, ruthless anti-heroine and you root for her bad self from beginning to end.

5. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (my review, Wikipedia entry)

I seem to have liked this movie a lot more than a lot of people but some of the discomforts people felt with the plot, especially with the superhero variants, were, I think, just Sam Raimi being a good horror movie director. There were hints, too, of the kind of madness that made Evil Dead 2 a great film. The inventiveness in how both Strange and Wanda used magic was truly refreshing.

4. Crimes of the Future (my review, Wikipedia entry)

It's not David Cronenberg's most groundbreaking film, but it is a return to form and a very welcome one. A meditation on the nature of art and the relationship between the mind and the body, it's of a piece with Cronenberg's lifelong obsession with the blurred line between the two.

3. The Banshees of Inisherin (my review, Wikipedia entry)

At turns delightful and horrific, charming and devastating, subtle and powerful, this deceptively cosy little comedy is a meditation on some of the more difficult to quantify aspects of human need.

2. Three Thousand Years of Longing (my review, Wikipedia entry) A splendid film on the importance of experiencing the fantastic. It's a kind of colourful story very necessary in a world where people are urgently pressured into seeing everything as ones and zeroes.

1. The Fabelmans (my review coming soon, Wikipedia entry)

I really didn't expect this to be my favourite film of the year but, yeah, I have to say it is. The reviews I've read and seen completely miss some of the best parts of it. In a year filled with movies that analyse the nature and value of dreams and storytelling, this one exhibits the most intimate understanding of the concepts involved. It's Steven Spielberg's best movie since Munich and a surprisingly insightful meditation on what it means to be an artist from a filmmaker who's too often looked down upon as being merely entertaining. I have a lot more to say about this movie than any other I saw from 2022 but I'll have to get to that to-morrow.

2022 on the Small Screen

Happy New Year, everyone. It's after 9am on Sunday in Japan so it's already well into 2023 here. Normally around this time I make a list, ranking all the movies I saw in the preceding year. But as television has become a more and more prominent medium, I'm going to do two lists now and I'll start to-day with my television list. To-morrow I'll post my movie list.

This is a ranking of all TV shows I saw in 2022, excluding shows I only watched the first episode of (Interview with the Vampire, Severance). I included shows that concluded in 2022, so I'm not counting Willow, which will count for 2023, and I am counting The Book of Boba Fett, which started in 2021 but concluded in 2022. I'm also not including specials--the Doctor Who specials, the two Marvel specials. But that still leaves me with a list of 19 shows! I watched 19 TV shows last year! Good grief.

Anyway, here we go.

19. The Rings of Power, season 1 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

Is it fair to call it the worst show I saw last year, when it had such expensive visuals? Yeah. The writing was that bad.

18. Tales of the Jedi (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

Dave Filoni squeezes most of the life out of some of our favourite Jedi, giving us some backstories that reveal Count Dooku and Ahsoka Tano are duller than we as yet suspected.

17. Ms. Marvel, season 1 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

The first couple episodes are pretty cute and engaging and Iman Vellani has real charm as the protagonist. But then it all rapidly spiralled into a dull mess and Vellani's performance mysteriously became somnambulent, as though she knew this was crap.

16. Obi-Wan Kenobi, season 1 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

Ewan McGregor and Andrew Stanton managed to drag this show out of the morass of notoriously bad writing to give us a few decent moments.

15. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, season 1 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

In a pattern everyone is becoming familiar with, this show had a pretty good first couple episodes followed by astonishingly bad ones written by inexperienced or plain talentless hack writers. This one had a few other good points, including a memorable appearance by Daredevil, but it completely choked with its arrogant, tone deaf finale.

14. Wednesday, season 1 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

Jenna Ortega, Tim Burton, and Danny Elfman work some real magic, managing to bring some quality to a show with average quality writing.

13. Kimetsu no Yaiba season 2 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

It's nice to catch up with these great characters but the makers of this show made two big mistakes--they rehashed the movie in the first half of the season and, in the second half, extended a bloody battle sequence across several episodes, stretching the story well past its capacity to hold the viewers' interest. They were two mysterious choices for a show based on a lengthy manga with presumably plenty of story at hand to fill a season.

12. The Expanse season 6 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

It used to be one of the best shows on television but, sadly, its final season was made ridiculous and incoherent by external politics. Still, it had enough of its old self lingering on to make one or two aspects worth watching.

11. Moon Knight season 1 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

Oscar Isaac delivers a magnificent performance in a show that, at its best, wove a good supernatural adventure tale mixed with psychological hallucination.

10. Spy x Family season 1 (Wikipedia entry)

The latest anime to take Japan by storm, this one is an excellent outlet for the country's famous fetish for Western aesthetics while also offering a sly commentary on the modern Japanese family dynamic.

9. Only Murders in the Building season 2 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez continue to be a magnetic combination and this season's roster of guest stars were certainly memorable. Shirley MacLaine in two appearances showed she still possesses the extraordinary instincts of a real movie star.

8. The Book of Boba Fett season 1 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

The writing went off the rails at points but Boba's life among the Sandpeople was an engrossing story. Robert Rodriguez pulled off some good action sequences, some highlights being Boba's encounter with a sand monste in the first episode and his showdown with Cad Bane.

7. Stranger Things season 4 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

Some disappointing retconning of the superior earlier seasons and a waste of several characters couldn't totally detract from this show's positive qualities. New character Eddie Munson was another all too brief hit for the show and the memorable use of Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" justly brought that song back to mainstream popularity.

6. The Orville season 3 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

The third and possibly final season of The Orville is its most visually spectacular and its most tightly written. Some of the political pandering became a little tiresome but, at other times, the show was as thought provoking as the '90s Star Trek series that inspired it.

5. House of the Dragon season 1 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

Giving us back some of that sweet, sweet fantasy soap opera we knew and loved on Game of Thrones before Benioff and Weiss wrecked it, House of the Dragon was an absolute pleasure from week to week.

4. The Sandman season 1 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

The deviations from the source material diminished this show, most notably when it came to scenes with Satan and Rose Walker. But, for the most part, the show is faithful to Neil Gaiman's great achievement in '90s comics and we're all better off for it.

3. Peacemaker season 1 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

This is James Gunn at his best. Building off his fabulously fucked up take on The Suicide Squad, this show settles down and gets drunk on thoughtfully fucked family and espionage drama. It was brilliant, captivating, and a whole lot of fun.

2. Better Call Saul season 6 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

The subplots about Gus and Lalo never really became interesting and the final episode was a bit of a letdown. However, in the characters of Jimmy/Saul and Kim, this show gave us some of the best writing in television history. Standout episodes "Nippy" and "Waterworks" are like great standalone films, masterpieces of tension and psychological exploration.

1. Andor season 1 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

This one is flawless. Tony Gilroy brought Star Wars back in a big way with this show that is a thought provoking treatise on politics, a captivating character drama, and a suspenseful war narrative. And best of all, it's about how all three of these things work together, making each other more brilliant. To borrow a phrase from Huey Lewis, the heart of Star Wars is still beating.