Well we’ve cooked the Turkeys of the year and feasted on their meat and skin whilst sharing drinks and good times with those we care about well now its time to reveal my favourite films of 2020.
And this is a lean but strong list this year with 3 terrific contenders starting with:
Howard: This long promised but rarely seen documentary finally made its way to Disney Plus this year and it was a doco that I was very keen to see as it was about the life of lyricist Howard Ashman who was a Broadway icon and who helped steer Disney Studios into a new era of success only to die at a young age of AIDS in 1991.
And this documentary did great justice to this great man, we get to see a look into Howards early life as told by his Sister Sarah as she describes a play he put together with toy figures one day, we see his ups and downs on Broadway and how it and him clashed and finally his genius lyrics who paired with Alan Menken’s music burst forth a new era for Walt Disney Studios and how that very studio rallied to his aide as he was dying of AIDS yet still fighting on to the very end in a time when it was seen primarily as a “Gay Disease”
Also at one point you hear this lecture from him and Alan at the 92Y in New York in 1988 where this near complete oral history of Broadway Musicals as a medium is being told at the same time you hear the tale from his partner Bill about learning that he was HIV positive, how sad that such a horrible disease that was so dismissed because only a certain group caught it took so many bright and talented people from us before it was their time to go.
2. Little Women: This movie opened literally on New Years Day on Australia and it was a movie I really wanted to watch mainly because Greta Gerwig was making this movie.
And I adored it, it was firstly just so beautifully written and directed by Ms Gerwig who took what is a 40 million dollar movie and made it look like a near 100 million dollar movie, every one involved under her command in terms of the music, editing, cinematography, production design and costumes is delivering terrific work the score by Alexandre Desplat in particular is my favourite movie score in many a long year.
Also Ms Gerwig’s script adaptation really finds a way to blend both the source material by Louisa May Alcott as well as details of her own life as a writer and it along with the fractured structure of this new film version really serves to help make it stand apart and be its own thing from the 1994 film by Gillian Armstrong and the earlier ones that came before that.
And performance wise everyone involved is fantastic, people like Emma Watson/Meryl Streep/Laura Dern who I have had love/hate relationships with in terms of their movie work are great here Ms Dern in particular is quite good as Marmie and her resemblance to Saoirse Ronan is very telling in some scenes, Eliza Scanlen, Ms Ronan, Ms Watson and Florence Pugh are all great together as the March Sisters while Timothee Chalamet and Chris Cooper deliver very solid backup work as the Laurence family.
Hopefully soon Columbia/Tristar will see fit to release this movie on a 4K Ultra HD disc one day as it would look and sound fantastic there.
But now we crown the number 1, my favorite film of 2020 which is:
Tenet: Yes after a long long wait I finally got to sit in a nice cinema and watch Christopher Nolan’s latest film Tenet a film I was keen to see but had heard mixed things about before getting to do so.
But I just had a absolute ball with this movie firstly I really love a lot of the cast here, John David Washington is every inch his father’s son and commands the screen with effortless cool and charisma to burn like a young Denzel did many years ago, Robert Pattinson is very good here and would make an excellent James Bond one day while Elizabeth Debicki does what she can with her role.
As always with Nolan’s work the scale of the filmmaking continues to amaze especially when you saw the movie on a big cinema screen with a great sound system which I was fortunate and grateful to do so and the music score by Ludwig Gorannson really adds to the movie while the action scenes look fantastic especially the beginning and ending scenes.
And lastly I really loved the time trick Christopher Nolan plays in this movie which is essentially the Backwards world from Red Dwarf and as someone who knows that episode well it helped to plug in the gaps the film sometimes has in explaining how it all works and at one point I was like “Well in the Backwards world your working towards the point where that happened and then the Second World War will start backwards and Nodol is in Bulgaria its known for Mineral Wealth just south of Bosnia” though that just makes me sound like the Smart Party.
And so that was 2020 in film or what was left of it given how many of the big films either couldn’t open at all or went virtual in the festival circuit and hopefully in 2021 we will begin to vaccinate the population and then we can finally see No Time to Die and Top Gun: Maverick and Dune where they belong, on the cinema screen in the link where we give ourselves to the movies and they give us something back in return.
That link is something that I have really really missed this year whether it be the friends I made in the cinema staff or seeing that film you’ve been looking forward to doing so or even thinking about how this whole different strand of your life opened up simply because you went to the movies and told people about them, I hope sincerely that for the rest of my life this link is never severed again.
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