2018 in Film Part 2: The Best and Worst

Well my main thoughts on 2018 in Film are done and now the time has come to reveal my main lists of my favorite and least favorite films of 2018 and well what better way to start with the worst of the year, those 5 films that took 2 hours out of our lives that we’ll never get back and I always enjoy writing these lists because you get to do one more shot at these films and do them all slowly.

5. Deadpool 2

Now this will be a surprising choice for many but I decided to put it here as I hated watching this sequel in cinemas back in May and I was a fan of the first Deadpool film with Ryan Reynolds and directed by Tim Miller though this time David Leitch of Atomic Blonde takes the directorial reins.

I hated this movie because I felt its storyline was a mess, juggling a couple of plotlines in terms of this little boy played by Julian Dennison, the introduction of X-Force and a continuiation of Deadpool and Wade Wilson’s character and if the first Deadpool reminded me of the first Robocop film albeit not as good in my eyes then this one reminded me in bad ways of Robocop 2.

And that film like this one brought in all these storylines that didn’t really work, it went for a more serious tone that it didn’t earn as I wasn’t really that invested in it, the little boy annoyed me an awful lot and Ryan Reynolds who Miller knew when to let him off the leash but also rein him in here just sounded like a goddamn parrot talking endlessly in nearly every single scene and after a while I just thought to myself “Will you Please Shut Up, you sound like a fucking Parrot.”

Hopefully next year’s Detective Pikachu will use Reynolds’s vocal riffs a lot better but we’ll have to wait and see.

4. Mute

Mute was a Netflix production directed by Duncan Jones who’s last film was Warcraft and concerned an Amish private eye played by Alexander Skarsgard as he went searching for his missing girlfriend.

And boy oh boy was this a fucking bore to sit through for 2 reasons firstly the whole look of the film not only looked really cheap like shot digitally cheap but it was such a riff on Blade Runner with its neon signs everywhere, flying transport, dark skies and funky nightclubs and robots around the place that it feels old hat now to do this kind of homage especially when this came only a few months after Blade Runner 2049 hit cinemas.

And also Alexander Skarsgard who was not yet won me over like his father Stellan Skarsgard has and it isn’t helped that his performance is the kind of expressionless blank performance that stoic performers like Ryan Gosling can do although that has grown tiresome now given the weak performance of First Man in cinemas but the central mystery he’s trying to solve isn’t really that interesting and after a while I got really bored of it.

3. Sicario: Day of the Soldado

Now I quite liked the first Sicario directed by Denis Villenuve, it had a good script, Emily Blunt was great as this Clarice Starling esque character going into Mexico and it had a great supporting performance by Benicio Del Toro and Josh Brolin almighty Thanos, Blunt didn’t return but Brolin and Del Toro did.

And boy oh boy is this movie a mess for one very clear reason: The script, this thing feels like 2 separate movies one being Brolin’s character and his attempts to work with US officials and the other being Del Toro trying to get this young girl to the border as if he was in a rip off of Logan.

And neither one of these plotlines feels like they mesh together as one coherent film a lot of the time I felt like I was watching 2 separate films spliced together to make it one film and even the presence of Josh Brolin who was pretty much the main reason I saw this movie couldn’t do anything to save it.

2. The Happytime Murders

Boy oh boy oh boy was this a pure and utter stinker of a movie for three reasons.

The first was that the central mystery simply didn’t work, it was one of those where it was blindly obvious who the killer was and at one point one of the Muppets does a homage to Basic Instinct which was really really bad and even the reveal of the killer just felt very silly.

This leads me to my second issue the tone is all over the place on the one hand it wants to be a Roger Rabbit type world with the Muppets and Humans living together and this hard boiled detective trying to solve a mystery yet on the other hand it tries to go for that MA15 style comedy with sex jokes, bonking in the office and really really obnoxious humour that Melissa McCarthy just shouts a lot of the time and I’m a big fan of hers.

And the comedy is my third issue this movie isn’t funny it tries to go for these big laughs that films so rarely in my experience capture as they only really work when you see the film with a big audience but rarely did I ever laugh and I like a good comedy but this just went down like a deflating Muppet that’s lost its stuffing.

But as bad as those films were those weren’t as bad as my worst of 2018 which is:

The Predator.

Now I was very excited for this movie as I had rewatched the original film directed by John McTiernan in 4K which was great and Shane Black who was actually in the original film playing Hawkins was co-writing and directing this new film and I thought “This could work.”

Alas it did not and the more I thought about the film the more it broke my heart and that feeling was very prelevant in my mind when I walked out of the film for as great as the MA action violence in the film was this new Predator failed at the very things that McTiernan’s original made work.

The first of those was the characters not once did I really give a flying fuck about any of them all they ever seemed to talk in was script language where every line coming out of their mouth was a cheap attempt at a one liner or a cool phrase and it really didn’t work and the film even goes so far to almost make light of Tourette’s Syndrome a very serious condition and Autism a condition many people live with today and doesn’t get talked about anywhere near as much as it should do.

And secondly the story was very very weak a new Predator comes to Earth and then a whole bunch of other Predators come and after a while it just turns into a repeat of the original where their in a Jungle environment and hunting the creature and I wish that had been the case in the first place put a bunch of guys somewhere, have a Predator come and then KABLAMO you have your movie but No we got a whole bunch of other storylines and stereotypes that really weren’t needed one little bit.

Ah now I can breathe a sign of relief as the Turkey’s have been thrown out and writing that is making me think of Selina’s Turkey sound she used to play on the Radio show so I’ll just pretend that’s here.

Now comes the best films of the year and it was a struggle to get it 5 as there were 4 that I loved and 2 or 3 others that I really liked but in the end I’ve gone with 5a and 5b so without further ado here we go:

5b. First Man

Damien Chazelle’s follow up project to his Oscar winning film La La Land was a biopic of Neil Armstrong that also showed the perilous journey of US Astronauts to the Moon.

And this was also a movie that I really got into even though I could see some of the problems people had with the film in terms of the lack of emotional resonance but the main thing I really liked about it was the showing of that journey to the moon, all of the trail and error and the lives that were lost along the way.

Also the film was a visual treat with its grainy 60s look and many closeups and the sound design was very impressive from the sound of the engines to the silence of space plus there were great performances particularly by Claire Foy and Kyle Chandler, it might not have worked for some but it definitely worked for me.

5a. Bohemian Rhapsody

Yes the story of the late great Freddie Mercury and the band Queen which was directed by Bryan Singer with additional filming by Dexter Fletcher who finished the filming when Singer was fired in late 2017 was uneven at times but when it works it is electrifying, delivering an emotional charge to every sense I could ever have be it sadness, smiling, laughter and SINGING and those empty Drink Bottles made for great pretend microphones.

One reason is simply Rami Malek’s extraordinary performance as Freddie and there were times looking at him in the movie from certain angles I thought I was looking at the real Freddie reincarnated as he captures not only the extraordinary showmanship that had crowds in his hands like glue but also the loneliness and the directness of the private man plus most of the actors deliver great performances in particular Gwilym Lee who looks a lot like Brian May that he must have done the mind time travel trick from Days of Future Past to send his younger self to be in the film and Lucy Bonyton as Mary Austin who does a great job as Freddie’s long time companion and friend.

But also this movie’s concert scenes are exhilarating and sounded great on a big cinema screen with the booming sound system the Live Aid recreation in particular has been the single best scene I’ve seen in any movie this year as it was such a charge of electricity to my heart that I was walking around the Warnambool Plaza still with a huge buzz inside, I can’t wait to do it all again in a sing along session one day with a packed crowd.

4. A Quiet Place

A Quiet Place was director John Krasinki’s Sci-Fi Horror film that was simply terrific to watch, this was a world where everyone had to be very quiet (shhhhhhhh) otherwise the creatures that have invaded Earth would hear them, hunt them down and kill them and as someone who has not been a big horror fan I really enjoyed that.

This was a horror film that was also built on a great idea and it was the kind of horror idea that made you go “How would I act in this situation?” and a lot of horror films for me don’t really have that kind of strong idea driving it too often there’s a reliance on blood and body parts and jump scares to terrify its audience and very very very rarely does that work as all ti does is either bore the audience and leave them feeling disgusted.

This film also had some great performances by Emily Blunt who is really one of her generation’s finest actresses (the scene in the bathtub still gives me the willies when I think about it.) and Millicent Simmonds who is a young deaf girl whose entire world is sign language and silence and it helps to add to the films terrific sound design, editing and mixing and I really hope it sweeps the sound Oscars in 2019.

3. Mission Impossible: Fallout

Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie re teamed for their second Mission Impossible film after 2015’s Rogue Nation and it was well worth the wait when I got to see it as I was very hotly anticipating this movie.

And this film purely as an action film is the kind of adrenaline rush thrill ride that we so rarely see in today’s action films, everything you see for the most part is done for real with Tom once again putting his mind, body and soul on the line for all of those amazing stunt set pieces even breaking his ankle during filming and learning to fly a helicopter for the films climactic chase and all of those scenes were fantastic.

But also Christopher McQuarrie proves that he is becoming a good director in his own right along with his gifts as a screenwriter and though this story could’ve easily fallen apart it’s a testament to those writing gifts of his that he keeps the story going and gives each character a moment to shine even though the story is about Ethan Hunt and his purpose as a hero, it was great to see Rebecca Ferguson again after Rogue Nation and both Simon Pegg and Alec Baldwin also made welcome returns along with Ving Rhames.

This movie also had a great performance by Henry Cavill as well who I feel is a worthy successor to Christopher Reeve as Superman and watching him and Tom go at it was so much fun as was Sean Harris as Solomon Lane and if the James Bond series ever recasts Blofeld he would be a great choice.

2. Avengers Infinity War

This was easily my most anticipated movie of 2018 as it was not only the culmination of 10 years of Marvel Studios and the coming together of the Avengers and the Guardians of the Galaxy but also finally the coming of Thanos as played by Josh Brolin.

And boy oh boy was I not disappointed in the slightest as this was everything I had hoped it would be and dreamed it would be but not in a way that I ever expected but more importantly it was special again like the first Avengers film was and it also highlighted how bitterly disappointing Age of Ultron was.

But why was it special again?

Firstly the storytelling here was very sound and it takes full advantage of not only the 149 minute runtime barely wasting a minute of it but also wrangling the huge number of characters the film has both sets of Avengers plus the Guardians get ample amounts of screen time and play the parts the script needs them to do very well and it also helps that we’ve had 10 years and many movies of these characters so their use is well served by that long journey.

But this movie for me is really Thanos’s movie and Josh Brolin did an excellent job playing him, the cold calm demeanour he always portrays as he seeks to eradicate half the universe makes him all the more effective as a villain as he barely raises his voice and with the power of the Infinity Stones lays the smackdown on our heroes and using him as the spine of the storytelling structure was what helped to wrangle such a large case, I wish X-Men Apocalypse had done a similar thing with En Sabah Nur/Apocalypse himself his name was the title of the film and he should’ve been much more centre stage in his own film.

But now we come to my number 1 film of 2018 and not one movie has come within cooee of this movie when I saw it all the way back in January (yes it was that long ago) and it is:

The Post

Yes folks, Steven Spielberg’s The Post is my number 1 film of 2018 even though it opened only 2 weeks into the year but why has no other film come close to it on my list well there are 2 reasons.

The first is that I really got to rethinking my feelings about Spielberg as a filmmaker as when I was 22 back in 2008 I was very sniffy about him and a lot of his movies feeling that they were too sentimental, to sweet and too sugary for my taste I preferred the harder edge and the bite of people like John McTiernan, George Miller, James Cameron and Paul Verhoeven among others but after watching this movie I got inspired to revisit several of his back catalogue movies and I now think of him as one of the grand masters of movie making.

And secondly this movie came out in Australian cinemas not that long after I got given the marching orders from the Radio station and watching this movie made me think of all those wonderful friends I had made during my time there and seeing people like them doing what they did on the big screen was a very moving experience for me and there was even one shot of Tom Hanks with his back to camera that instantly made me think of Stuart from that Office.

So yes this was that film like Dunkirk or the Accountant where my Head and my Heart were in perfect sync as compared to the other 4 films where my Head or my Heart were the dominant feelings that justified their presence.

And so that was my list of the best and worst of 2018 and with that the year is done even though I still have a couple of films left to see but the end of this year has been crazy and its left me behind the 8 ball on new releases even more than usual.

And now we come to 2019 the year of Blade Runner no less and January has my top 2 most anticipated films of the year in M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass and Dragon Ball Super: Broly a new Dragon Ball movie on the big screen which I have to see the moment it’s out.

There’s also Avengers: Endgame and the Secret Life of Pets 2 and Detective Pikachu and Godzilla: King of the Monsters to look forward to as well but Glass and Broly are my top 2 most anticipated of 2019 and whether they deliver the goods only time will tell but I can’t wait to find out.