2023 in Film Part 2: Favourites and Turkeys

And now we come to Part 2 of my 2023 retrospective in film and this covers my Turkeys of the year and my Favourites of the year movie wise and lets get the rubbish out of the way first shall we and cook some Turkeys that in some cases deserved to be thoroughly roasted.

5. The Flash:

Now initially when I saw this movie, I was of a more mixed mind on it but as I began to think about this list more and more I felt that it deserved to be here despite the films fun Batman action in a few scenes.

And the reason this is here is because the films third act is simply atrocious, first of all it looks like director Andy Muschietti who made the 2 IT films in 2017 and 2019 respectively has gotten to the last level in a video game and has to fight the final boss (in this instance Michael Shannon returning as General Zod from 2013’s Man of Steel and looking completely lost the entire time) only to get his ass kicked over and over like it was Shao Khan from Mortal Kombat 2 and 3.

And in all the worst ways it feels like a director hogging the controller as they endlessly try to finish this last level and complete the game but they keep failing either the main objective or fail to save all of the characters in that level and it just becomes so monotonous to sit through that it loses any and all character impact in the emotional moments it desperately tries to hit.

But this climax also gets so bogged down in timey wimey multiversal gobbledygook that I just sat there in my seat going “Oh What” more often than not and the CGI of the Flash running through the time circle thingy just looked like a fucking hamster on a wheel going around and around and around and the legs look like their made of industrial grade rubber instead of flesh, blood and bone.

And speaking of the CGI in this film it is at times really bad and the opening scene of the film with the Flash saving a group of people from a hospital collapsing I just had playing in my head “If I could save Time in a Bottle” from X-Men Days of Future Past and sure enough there is a YouTube fan edit of that scene with that song playing, I guess great minds think alike sometimes.

But now onto Number 4 and its another Superhero film with:

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania:

Wowsers, this was really bad.

And first off the films treatment of Ant-Man is where I have to start, now I like Paul Rudd and he has been fun in this role but he’s not smegging Captain America or Iron Man or Dr Strange or Spider-Man, the kind of marquee character you use to headline an important film which this was billed to be as, he is not that character he’s the fun goofy character who has smaller scale stories not one where he goes into strange new worlds to build up the new Thanos in Kang or give us a proper look at the Quantum Realm.

Speaking of the Quantum Realm it looked fucking terrible in this movie and more often than not I kept thinking to myself “My Eyes Hurt” as your just looking at this artificial environment in the vast majority of the film and it just looks like the actors were just standing on the Volume stage created for the Mandalorian series and none of it looks real or believable or tangible and this movie came out just 2 months after Avatar the Way of Water which is even more baffling.

And as for Kang well Jonathan Majors tried his best but this movie did that character dirty not only with not really building him up all that well as a genuine replacement for Thanos but also Ant-Man beats him in a one on one fight at the end of this movie.

Again let me repeat.

THIS WAS MEANT TO BE THE NEW BIG BAD AND HE LOSES IN HIS FIRST MOVIE!!

Sorry to go over the top like that but it kind of defeats the purpose of having a new villain for the Avengers (what’s left of them) to fight and have him lose to the one character he shouldn’t lose to under ANY circumstances and then they do these pointless teases of what was to come but that fell flat too, the sooner the MCU either gets away from this pointless villain or better yet calls it a day the better.

3. The Fabelmans:

Sometimes an artist’s great story is best left untold.

Now I was looking forward to this movie as I am a Spielberg fan and this was him telling the story of his life and the divorce of his parents and the trailer was good and got me emotional and I went into this keen to see it.

Boy did this leave me cold emotionally and feeling pretty much next to nothing when it was all over and there are 2 main reasons for this.

The first is that Spielberg has touched on so many of these ideas and themes in so many of his previous films that by the time he has gotten around to making it the core focus of a film it feels both too little and too late at the same time.

- The cold and sometimes aloof father figure well that was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Hook and Close Encounters

- The separated parents was a big part of ET and in fact Spielberg’s initial conception for that film is basically this one but with the Alien element added in

- The young man determined to go and make his mark on the world well that was done in the Amblin produced Back to the Future (a story Spielberg believed in the moment he heard it) and Gremlins as well as Empire of the Sun to a lesser extent

- The young group of friends on their bikes going off on an adventure was another Amblin production the Goonies

And lastly the war film that Sammy Fabelman makes feels like a group of 12 or 13 year olds seeing the opening of Saving Private Ryan and having their minds blown and then deciding to make their version of it the first chance they could.

And all of those other films I mentioned above can be watched by anyone, anywhere in the world and they will have a proper emotional reaction to it whereas here I felt nothing by the time it was over and the cameo at the end had me thinking “that was nice but I wish it was this other person who was far more important to the young Spielberg instead.”

And now the bottom 2 and boy does this Turkey deserve an almighty roasting:

Expend4bles:

A COVID Movie in all the worst ways.

First off the Expendables series had more or less come to a close with 2014’s 3rd entry which in and of itself wasn’t that great mainly because it went for an M rating instead of the MA rating the 2 previous films had and this one is also MA rated but it may as well not even have mattered as the action here is really bad with lots of quick cuts and shaky camera work and no real energy or verve to it.

Secondly the cast just goes through the motions, Megan Fox runs around in tight clothing and has no real chemistry with the Stath who really needs to be trying harder as he’s a fun actor to watch and should be making far better films, Andy Garcia just seems to be here so he can make some money again after being in lockdown for 2 years while the returning Expendables cast members just don’t seem to want to do anything other than the bare minimum.

But the worst part of this movie is the second half as the Expendables get onto a boat to find the bad guy and the device he’s stolen to wreak havoc and I thought to myself “okay this is the second act stop before the big finale” but NOOOOO we spend the entire back half of this movie on this damn boat where it feels like everyone who works on it has also been trained in the deadly arts I mean imagine going for a job on this boat.

“Hi I’m here to operate the Radio,”

“Very good, bunk down below and head to the Radio Room and tomorrow at 0930 hours there’s a martial arts course on the deck”

“Woohoo”

“Hi I’m here to be a Deck Hand,”

“Excellent, find a bunk and then get to work and tomorrow at 1030 hours we have advanced weapons training in Cargo Bay one”

“Alright”

“Hi I’m here to be a Ship’s Cook”

“Good, fund a bunk then report to the kitchen and tomorrow at 1100 hours we have knife training in Cargo Bay 3”

“Can I practice with the Knives in the Kitchen?”

“No”

“Ohhh”

Oh and about this feeling like a COVID Movie well there is so much green screen matting in this film that it feels like it was shot during the pandemic in a way where group scenes are at the barest possible minimum, most of the action can be in cars or flying vehicles or small enough groups so we can properly distance everyone and what location work there is was only done for smallest amount of time possible so we don’t flout any rules regarding outside gatherings.

Lionsgate had a good year this year with Hunger Games, John Wick and Saw doing pretty well but this did not and nor did it deserve to.

But there was indeed a worse movie than Expend4bles and it was late to the game but games are sometimes won in the last quarter like the 2018 grand final but this is not the prize you want to win especially when it comes from Walt Disney Animation the one group above all others that helped to foster my love of film.

Wish:

And when I saw this movie there was no doubt this was going to be my worst film of 2023.

And it breaks my heart to say this because whenever a new Disney Animated film comes out I have to see it at once as movies like Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Hercules from the 90s did so much to fuel my love of film and make it feel real and tangible (this year I got a proper Australian cinemas one sheet of Aladdin from 1993 framed) but this movie was simply awful on every level.

Firstly the story here is rough and it feels rough as you watch it as none of it feels organic or thought out or cohesive in any meaningful way, it just goes from one story beat to the next and one character moment to the next with next to no cohesion to it and it just jumps around all over the place and after a while it really starts to show.

Next up the characters are annoying, I love Ariana DeBose but here she tries and fails rather miserably to try and channel the same cute and quirky comedic energy Kristen Bell did as Anna in the Frozen films when she should’ve been more like Elsa in the Frozen films but no we can’t seem to do that nowadays or have her be like Ariel or Belle or Jasmine and want an adventure to go on or to not have their life lived for them or god forbid marry someone for love no we can’t have that it seems they have to be stoking the fires of revolution and/or trying to change the world to better suit them.

And it really really doesn’t work as Asha’s motivations don’t make any sense, she doesn’t get her way so she decides to overthrow the King basically despite the fact that the Kingdom she lives in is full of people who from what we see in the movie seem happy and content and don’t seem to be suffering or living in any kind of tangible poverty but none of that matters because one person doesn’t get what they want and thinks the world should revolve around them, give me a fucking break.

And does she suffer any consequences for her actions like Aladdin did for his lying to Jasmine and the Genie in that film, Nope not one bit but again we can’t have that nowadays can we.

As for the sidekicks well their annoying too and the talking goat in particular does anything but spout the same meaningless platitude that a talented cast had to vomit out of their mouths in 2018’s A Wrinkle in Time and like in that film its just so fucking annoying to listen to over and over and over again.

And then there’s King Magnifico the villain who just turns into a villain what seems like at random and without any meaningful arc that turns him to the dark side and it really doesn’t work at all and neither do the songs or the animation which like the characters and storytelling have a rough feeling to it but there’s a movie to be put out so let’s just feed it through the AI machine we just bought and that’ll do.

And it ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH!!! Again sorry to go over the top again and sound animated but this group of Disney Animation severely needs a kick up the ass for giving their fans this mediocre drivel not once but also last year with Strange World which was so deathly dull to sit through and even Encanto which didn’t really feel as magical as it thought it was.

And to go back to the 90s that group of talent was led by Jeffery Katzenberg who for all his mistakes knew what talented artists he had and wasn’t afraid to make them fight for their ideas, defend their ideas and throw out their ideas if they weren’t good enough nor was he afraid to make them scrap their work and start over again if it wasn’t good enough and he also wasn’t afraid to crack the whip when needed or bend when a good enough argument was made against his suggestions, Disney desperately needs that leadership again otherwise it will go back to the rut it fell into post Walt’s death until he and Michael Eisner took over in 1984.

Ah, that felt good.

Now we can serve the Turkeys on the table and feast on the goodness as here are my 4 favourite films of 2023 and this group of films were the ones that made it without any question and it was a group that I loved as much as I did and wanted to talk about more often than not and wanted to recommend widely to my friends but numbering them was tricky and the ordering changed depending on my mood but this listing is what it will probably be so let’s start with Number 4:

Elemental:

Now I wasn’t overly keen for this movie as it was coming after the debacle that was Lightyear last year which topped my Turkeys list for 2022 and the previews did nothing to help but when I saw it I was surprised at how much I liked it.

But it made this list after I did a rewatch of the film at home on Disney Plus and after that rewatch I came to adore the film for two main reasons:

The first of those being the world of Element City that the film creates, here Earth/Fire/Wind and Water (No Heart sorry so no Powers Combined I am Captain Planet here to be found) live together in as harmonious an environment as possible though the Fire element is sometimes treated with suspicion and doesn’t integrate as well as the other elements do but the way this world is realised was fun to spot on both watches of the film, I particularly got a good laugh out of the way the Water people cry in some scenes it felt like they could create a flood with their tears or help solve a drought.

And secondly this movie had a sweet love story at its core between a fire element in Ember and a water element in Wade and their scenes together were just wonderful from the first meeting to getting to know each other to figuring out whether they could hold hands and/or hold each other to finalising realising their true feelings for each other, this was a great reminder to me that Pixar when it tries still has some of that old magic left in it.

3. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes:

Now the odds were surprising for this film as while I was looking forward to it a part of me was nervous as to how it would translate to film as this was about Snow who was played as the President of Panem in the earlier movies by Donald Sutherland as a young man and reading his lines in the book I read them in Sutherland’s voice.

But this movie managed to pull that off and Tom Blyth deserves all the praise for doing so as he was the make of break of this movie and he made it big time and he had great assistance by Rachel Zegler as Lucy Gray Baird who like Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen I just cannot imagine anyone else in that role, she had great twisted chemistry with Blyth, did all of her singing live on set and sounded great and she did a great job with the southern accent and the more serious moments of the film.

Other great performances were Josh Rivera, Hunter Schafer, Jason Schwartzman, Peter Dinklage, Viola Davis and Burn Gorman who did great work with their characters and were never boring to watch plus the world building in this movie is excellent as it has been in the rest of this series with the costumes, sets, music and props all making Panem feel real and believable as a film world you want to immerse yourself in.

And also this movie does a great job with the Games themselves, most of the time I found the Games in the other films not as interesting as the politics or intrigue or character arcs that came before them but here Francis Lawrence returning to direct the film after directing Catching Fire and the 2 Mockingjay films gives them a real savagery that they’ve sometimes lacked and the film is better for it.

2. Air:

I was looking forward to this movie mainly because it was Ben Affleck’s new film and not really it being about the creation of the Nike Air Jordan shoe and I liked what I saw in the preview for it but when I watched it I was riveted from start to finish.

Firstly Affleck’s direction this time around has the same tightness and confidence and sense of ease to it that the Town and Argo had and even with elements of Live By Night but wisely Ben doesn’t take on as many roles on this movie as he did there and to that films detriment, he knows how to let the scenes play out, when to use archival footage and songs from the mid 1980s in a way that makes you feel your in that period and living it and also how to direct his actors in a way that brings out the best in them performance wise.

And this movie is littered with great performances, Matt Damon is terrific here channelling is likeable everyman persona into a corporate suit and it feeling very effective, Viola Davis as Michael Jordan’s mother (a casting choice he himself wanted) is extremely good and along with the Woman King cements her as probably my favourite actress working today, Jason Bateman is a lot of fun as a rival Nike executive while Chris Messina gets to channel Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire in the best way as the sports agent who doesn’t want his client to go to Nike.

And lastly this movie does such a great job of tapping into the myth of Michael Jordan, his face is never seen in the film and the only glimpses you get of him are from behind and it really works well as it makes him feel mythic and larger than life which to a generation of people he was and the Last Dance documentary series very much focused on the man and beautifully this when I rewatched it felt that it focused on the myth and it worked equally as well as many of us liked to dream that he was me and that we could be Like Mike.

And now we come to Number 1 my favourite film of 2023 and once more Christopher Nolan has won with his new film:

Oppenheimer:

This movie was simply a great achievement by Nolan who for me has gone from strength to strength as a director since Interstellar in 2014 which I felt ran away from him in terms of his ambition for that film but with Dunkirk, Tenet and now Oppenheimer it feels like he has learned from the failure of that film and crafted his work in a way that maintains its ambition but doesn’t get the better of him and one key person who has helped make that happen is Jennifer Lame his editor on this film and Tenet and she deserves to win the Editing Oscar for her work here as it is remarkable.

But this movie on the whole is a fascinating one to think about because on the one hand this is a pure character drama, the purest Nolan has made and yet it is still riveting to watch whether it be conversations between Cillian Murphy (brilliantly playing Oppenheimer himself) or Tom Conti’s Albert Einstein which is casting that feels so spot on its ridiculous or Robert Downey Jr’s scheming Senator who feels Oppenheimer represents a national security threat to the country because of his past ties to Communism or the makeshift office scenes with Jason Clarke interrogating his witnesses, its all riveting stuff and Nolan does it like a master never once letting the tempo sink or get too boring to watch.

On the other hand this feels like a physics class as well as you learn about what it really took to invent the Atomic Bomb and the race against the Nazi clock to have one before they do so they can turn the tide of World War 2 in the Allies favour and those scenes again are people in rooms theorising, sharing their results, yelling at people to get them to realise how important this is to the cause of the War and then the devastating aftermath as Oppenheimer realises he has now given the world the power to destroy itself in a matter of moments in Mutually Assured Destruction.

In any other directors hands this movie could’ve been a real mess but the way Nolan crafts it from his scripting to direction to the performances he gets (even if once again the women are let down with pretty nothing roles something that he REALLY needs to fix with his next film) to Lame’s editing to the music score to the sound design (especially during the Trinity Test scene) and cinematography this was simply amazing filmmaking and like James Cameron it makes me wish we had more like him or Nolan or Greta Gerwig making movies.

Because if we did I can’t help but feel that movies, something I’ve loved and have been passionate about since I was a boy and helped to open doors in my life I never thought of and make great friends as a result of that might just get back that certain cultural attaché they’ve had for many decades but has slowly started to become lost in recent years.

And so that was 2023 in film, hopefully 2024 is a good year as well but given the length of the writers and actors strikes and the shut down of production that caused I fear it will be another slim year movie wise that does little or nothing to bring them back to prominence in culture, I hope most sincerely I am wrong but I fear I will not be and that makes my heart sink a little but we’ll have to wait and see and hope for the best.

2023 in Film Part 1: The State of the Studios

And so another year in film is coming to an end and its been an interesting one to say the least.

It was a year that started off very strongly and then seemed to peak with the Barbenheimer craze in late July and since then it feels like it just spluttered along to the finish line like a bad engine in a car as many films struggled to find a large enough audience (my main cinema at one point scaled back their operating hours and sessions per day because it got so quiet it wasn’t worth opening all day long.)

One big reason for this was the dual strikes that crippled the industry from the beginning of May to mid November a near 7 month long period of stonewalling, drawn out negotiations, underhanded tactics, so called “last best offers” and then a deal being done between the studios and the writers and actors guilds that had to be done and could’ve been done before the American Labor Day weekend in late August/early September.

And while it had impacted the last 3 months of the movie year to some extent in terms of actors not being able to promote their films or productions being shut down or writers not being able to pitch new movies and/or TV shows to streamers and studios but I fear the full impact of the strikes will not be properly felt until sometime in 2024 when there is a near baron wasteland of new films and TV shows due to how long and unnecessarily dragged out the strikes became and the negotiations on new deals.

Which leads me to the State of the Studios, a list that I really enjoyed writing last year and decided to keep going from now on and last year Paramount was the clear winner while Universal and Sony/Columbia/Tristar had good or okay years while Roadshow, Warner Brothers and Disney still looked like they were struggling to bounce back post the Dark Times of the COVID Pandemic.

Well this year Roadshow isn’t on this list as they didn’t really make much of a dent in the marketplace and their one big film Force of Nature: The Dry 2 was the first film to be delayed due to the strikes (one of my other most anticipated films Dune Part 2: Long Live the Fighters was also delayed due to the strikes) so it didn’t get released and every indication was it would’ve been a huge hit for them which they need as they no longer have the financial pipeline of the Warner Brothers films to help them.

But as for the rest and oh boy the bottom of the pile is a classic case of how things can change in a single year.

5. Paramount:

One year your cock of the walk, the next your cock of nothing.

And that is precisely what has happened to Paramount in 2023 as they suffered from a combination of bad timing release wise and plain simple bad luck and bad management.

And the bad management side of things is on the Scream franchise where after having the biggest box office opening of the entire franchise with Scream 6 and that film showing that it didn’t need Neve Campbell to carry it forward they sat back and let Spyglass stab it to death by essentially firing Melissa Barrera because of views she shared regarding current events in the Middle East to letting Jenna Ortega go as well and Scream 6 really centred them as the leads of the series going forward and they were great.

Plus they had a good choice of director in Chris Landon who made Happy Death Day and Freaky 2 really fun horror films and now he’s gone, Paramount could and should have done more to keep this series afloat and now it lies on the floor with multiple stab wounds and blood on the executive suite floors.

As for bad luck well that befell both Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves and Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One 2 films that were pretty good and fun to watch but just got totally swept up in the storm of other films releasing around them, in the case of Dungeons and Dragons it was the one two punch of John Wick Chapter 4 and Super Mario Brothers 2 big hits that just totally caught the attention of the main audience that D&D was aiming for and when you only have so much ticket money to spend those 2 films got the priority.

As for Mission Impossible it not only had to deal with the gathering storm of Barbenheimer but also the strong dislike for Tom Cruise personally among an awful lot of people out there and while they might have bitten their tongue regarding him for Top Gun: Maverick last year they weren’t willing to do it this time and also that film had Christopher McQuarrie on his fourth film in a row in this series which is seeing him end up like his old colleague Bryan Singer when he was on the X-Men series but also it no longer was the lighter and more fun contrast of the darker Daniel Craig James Bond films so it had to stand on its own this time and its box office showed on all of those fronts.

As for bad timing well that goes to Transformers: Rise of the Beasts and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem 2 films that its easy to forget that Paramount put them out this year as they got caught up in the wash of a busy release schedule and the fullness of time, I kept forgetting that Transformers came out this year as it came out during a big June that had Spider-Man, The Flash, Elemental and Indiana Jones and was a brand that was clearly not as big as it once was though I had more fun with it than I thought I would.

As for TMNT well it felt like it didn’t really gain much traction and like Transformers posted decent enough numbers at the box office and only cost 70 million to make but I’m certain that Paramount was hoping for much better numbers box office wise for both films but when you’ve been burnt on bad films in a series often enough audences become wary especially when cost of living, inflation and interest rates are biting and biting hard as they are right now.

Hopefully Paramount can bounce back in 2024 but we’ll have to wait and see.

4. Walt Disney Pictures:

Oh how the mighty really have fallen.

Disney had a bad year last year but this year feels like it was zapped by the Emperor’s lightning from Return of the Jedi as they are clearly paying the price for a clear lack of vision across all fronts.

And to do this honestly feels like an autopsy as Disney’s year was that bad so lets done the medical mask, gloves and gown and dive right in.

Lucasfilm: This has to be first off the rank as Lucasfilm put out Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny this year a film that many fans were already apprehensive about due to the age of Harrison Ford and the reception to 2008’s Kingdom of the Plastic Prop-sorry-Crystal Skull but boy oh boy it somehow turned out worse then even I thought it would.

And first of that was James Mangold the director of the film and a very good director he is too which gave me some optimism he would deliver a fun adventure but instead he went from an asset to a liability as it felt like his more mature and sombre tone didn’t really work and felt like it was more geared towards the very old audience that did actually go and see the film.

And then the film itself gets so bogged down in endless chase scenes that it forgets to tell a good story with a good villain and that was really just Mads Mikkelsen essentially doing the same thing he’s done so often now that it’s becoming boring to watch and sometimes you can tell he isn’t really trying that much and then the finale really didn’t make a lot of sense and in all the worst ways that kind of story can do you just sit there asking questions about how it makes sense when it doesn’t.

Oh and this cost 300 million dollars to make and not once do I believe it cost that much to make as it just looks like it was shot on green screen stages and some sets, why did they even bother?

Marvel Studios: Wowsers talk about a disaster in the making.

First off there was Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania which was one of the worst films I saw this year and it deserved to flop (I’ll talk about why I hated it more in my Turkeys list in Part 2.)

Then there was the Marvels where it felt like all the chickens regarding the MCU came home to roost with this film and while it is unfortunate it happened here it did and increasingly it feels like that 2019 was not only the peak of the MCU as a franchise with Avengers: Endgame but also the peak of the superhero genre itself as with only a few exceptions most of the comic book based films have struggled at the box office.

In hindsight the MCU should have either come to a proper end with Infinity War and Endgame given that those 2 films wrap up the storylines and characters so well that like Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi it makes it very difficult to justify continuing on after those films or had taken a long break while the acquisition of 20th Century Fox was sorted out and the Fantastic Four and the X-Men could be properly integrated in the MCU.

But given how badly the MCU has botched the Kree and the Skrulls in the Captain Marvel films, the Celestials in Eternals and now the Multiverse and Kang I really don’t know how anyone can have faith they will do right by Fantastic Four and Mutants but all those nerds became so adamant that the Rights had to return to Marvel even if it meant destroying nearly a century of movie going tradition so you’ll forgive me if I decide not to shed any tears if the MCU gets those wrong as well.

Then there is the catastrophic failure of both Wish and Haunted Mansion, Wish was a dreadful film that I’ll talk about more in my Turkeys list but Haunted Mansion cost for some baffling reason 155 million dollars to make and it went nowhere at the box office.

And these budgets are insane, 200 million plus for Wish, Ant Man and the Marvels, 250 million dollars for the Little Mermaid a woeful underperformer which I’m certain Disney wanted to hit a billion dollars worldwide just as the live action remakes of Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and the Lion King did while 300 million was spent on Indiana Jones, I’m sorry but given how fractured the movie going audience is now there is little to no justification for this recklessness regarding budgets and spending now and Disney has to change course.

But whether they can is another question as Bob Iger might have been the hero at one point his return to lead Disney at the end of last year has seen him this year live long enough to become the villain and I do not think that he is the man who should be leading Disney going forward and he risks becoming like the CEO of my beloved West Coast Eagles football club Trevor Nisbett where you simply stay too long in a leadership job and its time to move on but nor do I think that Nelson Peltz who has recently been seeking a seat on the board of Disney is the solution either.

No what Disney I feel needs is another Jeffrey Katzenberg who sure made bad decisions like cutting When Love is Gone from the Muppets Christmas Carol which was a colossal mistake but he was also someone that when he was put in charge of Disney Animation in the mid 80s helped to get it out of its rut and put the studio back on top again and he did that by being unafraid to ruffle the feathers of the artists who worked under him and cracking the whip when he needed to and out of that came great films.

But it wasn’t all doom and gloom for Disney this year as they had 2 good hits in Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and Elemental, Guardians was one of the few films this year that I had confidence in to do well regarded James Gunn and Co didn’t wet the bed in delivering a good finale for the series while Elemental was able to overcome a low opening weekend to leg out to nearly 500 million dollars worldwide due to good word of mouth.

Plus the studio celebrated its 100th anniversary wonderfully with the short Once Upon a Studio which as someone who loves Disney Animation made me feel emotional watching it and I can’t watch the end of it without wanting to cry so Disney had some wins this year but they really need to find some new leadership and fast if they want to get back on top.

3. Sony/Columbia/Tristar:

The little studio that could.

And indeed it did for while they didn’t have a great year they didn’t really embarrass themselves all that much either.

And first off the rack has to be Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse which had very good reviews and showed that the years of the first film being on Netflix and finding an audience it didn’t really get in its cinema release in 2018 meant that they came out to the cinema this time for number 2 and it delivered I think a better film as it had not only the great animation but also Miles and Gwen were far better fleshed out as heroes as they got to be the core focus this time instead of the Spider-Gang in the first film and it really made a difference for me.

Also the way that Miles is handled in comparison to the other Spider-Men he meets was well done also as he wants to be the one that decides how HIS story plays out and he doesn’t feel bound by the rules and regulations of the Spider-Men and their backstory was very well realised and I’ll be keen to see where the third film takes this and the Spider-Verse story as a whole and I hope they end it well.

But alas S/C/T has only really had Spider-Man going for it since the early 2000s as a lot of their other films (Equalizer 3, Gran Turismo, Anyone But You, Napoleon, No Hard Feelings and 65.) either did okay numbers at the box office or didn’t do very well at all and they cannot keep relying on the Web Slinger to give them good numbers as their Spider-Verse without a Spider-Man live action films have been very hit and miss at the box office.

And that is unhealthy for a major studio like this one, its good that they haven’t embarrassed themselves but they can’t just keep chugging along in neutral like some sports teams tend to do, if they want to win the premiership and enjoy the fruits of great success they need to step up to the plate like Dom Sheed in the 2018 Grand Final and go for it because if they don’t they’ll end up near or at the bottom and nobody should want that.

Now for number 2 the runner up and wowsers once again because these guys were fifth last year, second last having gone through a brutal regime change and a lacklustre slate of films but for the silver medal come on down.

Warner Brothers:

Yes you read that right folks, Warner Brothers is Number 2 this year.

And how can that possibly be, well firstly they had the biggest movie of the year in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie which managed to overcome some messy trailers and questions about who the movie was really for (a question Gerwig herself was asked point blank when in Sydney earlier this year promoting the film.) to become a mammoth hit.

And it deserved to for while I didn’t love it as much as others did mainly because of script issues I had with the film, it was also a movie that was just fun to watch and in this grey and sombre world we live in sometimes light and fluffy pink coated fun is all we need and Barbie delivered that while encouraging us all to wear pink to our session of the film.

Secondly they had 3 solid horror hits in The Meg 2: The Trench, Evil Dead Rise and The Nun II (quiet dark quiet dark NUN II) which didn’t cost a huge amount to make but became very profitable for the studio which Horror has been the last few years for the industry as a whole.

And lastly they are ending the year on a strong note with Wonka and the Color Purple both of which have had good word of mouth and look set to have good legs in cinemas over the December/January period, say what you will about David Zaslav the new head of Warner Brothers but the one promise he made to reprioritise theatrical for movies is starting to pay off and 2024 looks to be another good year for WB with Furiosa: A Mad Max Story, Beetlejuice 2, Joker: Folie A Deux, Godzilla X Kong and Dune Part 2: Long Live the Fighters showing potential to be huge hits if they deliver the goods.

But it hasn’t been all ham and plaques for Zaslav and WB as they had some bad headlines this year as well.

First of those is delaying Dune Part 2 from its original November 2nd release date to March 1st 2024 instead of using it as a ticking clock to help get the strikes resolved so it could’ve come out this year instead of next but given how well Wonka is doing this could help that film when it finally does come out.

Second the decision to scrap Coyote Vs Acme a Looney Tunes film originally designed for their streaming service HBO Max (now called Max) has justifiably seen a big backlash against Zaslav himself and the studio as a whole even though the last 2 Looney Tunes films (Back in Action from 2003 and 2021’s Space Jam: A New Legacy) bombed at the box office it saw several filmmakers cancel meetings with Warner Brothers and led to an image being formed that WB doesn’t care about making films and will scrap them for tax purposes if they so desire, I get the need to make money but if you just want to do that go and run a hedge fund or a bedding company instead.

And lastly there is DC on Film which has been a complete and utter migraine for the studio this year from Shazam! Fury of the Gods performing badly to the Flash performing much worse than what the studio had hoped it would to Blue Beetle being caught up in all of this mess and now Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom not proving to have the Way of Water in its veins like last years Avatar sequel did.

Part of that was outside events whether it be Ezra Miller or James Gunn and Peter Safran rebooting DC on film from near complete scratch or just the quality of the films themselves not being that great or only being good at best, hopefully Gunn’s Superman: Legacy in 2025 can turn things around but if it doesn’t then WB should simply move on as this genre is rapidly dying out anyway save for a few characters and WB has shown with its successful slate this year that it can do just fine without the Superfriends saving the day.

And now we come to the winner and this was the more I thought about it a no brainer.

Universal:

Yup the CIC group has won 2 years in a row.

And Uni has deserved this win as they had a number of successful films and only a small handful of flops which were mainly their 2 Dracula films Renfield and Voyage of the Demeter and Fast X.

Now Fast X did make money for the most part but mainly in international markets and nowhere near enough to cover the mammoth 340 million dollar budget the film had which like Disney’s reckless spending is insanity especially given how fractured the audience is nowadays, Universal really needs to pull Vin Diesel and Co into line on the next film to keep the cost down big time as this series is starting to lose petrol from its audience especially in the US.

As for the Dracula films well that isn’t any huge surprise as they weren’t that great or I didn’t really want to see it in the case of Renfield and I think it shows that most audiences have little to no interest in any new Dracula films.

Now for the wins well first has to be Super Mario Brothers, the only other film besides Barbie to be a billion dollar plus film worldwide and though I can normally see why a film clicks the way it does I honestly couldn’t with this one as while I didn’t hate it I also didn’t really think it was all that much either but I guess this shows the hunger was there for a proper film version of those characters especially when Nintendo themselves is helping to steer the ship.

Second is Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer which was a 3 hour character drama and physics class at the same time and yet showed Nolan’s incredible appeal in cinemas as this made 955 million dollars worldwide and showed that Nolan is very much a brand unto himself nowadays and could virtually go to any studio he wants, get any amount of money he wants and make oodles of it for them back, whether he decides to stay at Universal or head back to his former home of Warner Brothers will be very interesting to watch in the year ahead.

And lastly the studio had some great horror hits in M3gan, Knock at the Cabin and Five Nights at Freddys which were modestly budgeted and made a lot of money for the studio while Cocaine Bear did better than expected in cinemas and all of this is why Universal won top spot on the podium in terms of the studios in 2023.

But who will win in 2024?

Can WB finally take top spot?

Can Universal hold it?

Will Disney bounce back?

Can Paramount even survive?

Will Sony/Columbia/Tristar get their rear horse into gear and use lady Columbia’s torch to light a fire on its backside and get into the ring properly?

We’ll have to wait and see what happens and it will be fascinating to see what does happen.

Film Review - Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023)

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is the new Aquaman film and James Wan returns to direct and Jason Momoa returns as Arthur Curry aka Aquaman as he faces off again against David Kane/Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) who now possess his own dark trident of power and to stop him Arthur will need the help of his brother Orm (Patrick Wilson)

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is not a bad film per se but its one that while I was watching it I wish it was a lot better than it is as this film has so many talented people involved (Wan, Momoa, Wilson, Mateen II, Nicole Kidman, Teumeura Morrison, John Rhys-Davies, Amber Heard and Martin Short) that it feels like their all stuck in a pretty run of the mill story that does very little with most of them, Kidman in particular really gets the short end of the trident this time as she an iconic talent is stuck in a pretty thankless mother role that anyone could’ve done, if you’ve got Nicole Kidman give her some fun aquatic action of her own same with Morrison who pretty much does the napping grandpa role.

As for the story it feels like James Wan really wanted to channel Peter Jackson and his work on Lord of the Rings in terms of referencing his horror past but also delivering that big scale spectacle which Jackson did brilliantly in the Lord of the Rings but it feels more like your watching the Jackson of the Hobbit era with this film where the horror references kind of work but the spectacle feels small and very CG heavy and the CG is fine for the most part but it isn’t that large scale that you saw with the first film in 2018.

As for Momoa and Wilson their okay and have some good chemistry but Mateen II feels pretty wasted here with a pretty run of the mill villain role that doesn’t have the bite it should have given his plan here while Heard is in more of this movie than I thought she would be given what’s happened with her in real life but she does okay here.

And okay is not only how I would sum up Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom but also 2023 as a movie year on the whole, it wasn’t bad but not as good as it could have been either but I fear 2024 will be worse given how long and drawn out the writers and actors strikes became (and unnecessarily so too) that led to a big production shutdown for months hopefully it doesn’t get too bad but we’ll have to wait and see, 2 out of 5.

Film Review - Saltburn (2023)

Saltburn is the new film by Emerald Fennell who made a big splash and won an Oscar for her 2020 film Promising Young Woman, this film stars Barry Keoghan as Oliver, a top graduate student at Oxford University who befriends a young man named Felix (Jacob Elordi) but when Oliver finds himself without a home for the Summer Felix invites to his home manor called Saltburn where his strange family (Rosamund Pike, Richard E Grant, Carey Mulligan, Archie Madekwe and Alison Oliver) reside.

I was looking forward to this movie mainly because I loved Promising Young Woman when I got to see it in early 2021, Fennell showed a lot of promise as a new emerging talent and told a tale that felt like it tapped into some very real fears I’m sure her and most women have at some point in their life and so I was keen to see what deliciousness she would cook up next.

Sadly this is another case like Olivia Wilde’s film last year Don’t Worry Darling of the Sophomore Slump striking again as while I was watching this film unfold I kept thinking to myself “How on Earth can a film this pretentious and full of itself also be this dull and uninteresting?” as while the scenes at Oxford are fine they just went on for far too long and I didn’t really find them interesting.

Then again nor did I find the scenes at Saltburn Manor interesting either and this leads me to my first main problem with this movie, none of the characters here I found engaging in the slightest and the rich family in the manor felt more like caricatures than actual characters like you see in Ready or Not or the first Knives Out film, Pike and Grant are great actors but it feels like they are doing cartoon characters with Pike feeling like the ditzy trophy wife and Grant who has a peculiar way of talking already is doing that dialed up to 12 with his line. Readings. Like this.. in that voice he has and it really gets tiresome.

Mulligan who delivered career best work in Promising Young Woman is wasted here and it honestly feels like she came and did this on a day off a year or two back and put on the costume, did her lines and then went again and it feels like a waste to have someone who is doing great work right now be given a thankless and nothing character, Madekwe just sits around and says pithy lines like he’s part of the Social Golf Club from the Simpsons and Oliver is okay but doesn’t really get a lot to do.

But the biggest waste here is Keoghan who is a great actor and everything I’ve seen him in up to this point he’s delivered great work but here he is crushingly boring with his misfitting glasses and soft talking, most of the time I kept thinking that someone like Taron Egerton should’ve played this role instead as I never really believed Keoghan’s character came from a salt of the earth background.

But the one person I did like was Jacob Elordi and watching him here I thought to myself “This kid is going to be a star” and with this and Priscilla to end the year it seems that promise is starting to bear fruit and I will be keen to see what he does next as he has charisma and charm and can deliver drama and humour well.

And so that was Saltburn and I wanted this to be more than it was in terms of its risqué, storytelling and characters but the risqué felt dialed back and the storytelling and characters became dull and uninteresting, this is easily my biggest disappointment of 2023, 1 out of 5.

Film Review - Wish (2023)

Wish is the newest Disney Animation film and stars Ariana DeBose as Asha a young girl who lives in the kingdom of Rosas which is ruled by King Magnifico (Chris Pine) but one day a wishing ceremony is held and Asha hopes her 100 year old grandfather will have his wish granted but when that doesn’t happen Asha decides to get rid of the King and free his wish.

Wish is a near complete total disaster of a film and the more I have thought about it the more I come to loathe it.

Firstly, the whole wish thing doesn’t really make a lot of sense and more often than not feels like the wishing stone from Wonder Woman 1984 where it felt like any wish could be granted with no real rules attached to the stone, here any wish can be made to the King and more or less be granted if the moment is right and when you think of the Genie of the Lamp or the Dragon Balls which also grant wishes they have actual rules attached.

The Lamp has 3 main provisos: The Genie can’t kill anyone, can’t make anybody fall in love with anybody else and can’t bring people back from the dead while the Dragon Balls can’t revive someone who has either already died twice or died from a natural cause ie Cancer and Kami had to expunge the evil within him so he could become the guardian of the Earth and then create the Dragon Balls.

Secondly the characters here are deathly dull, I love Ariana DeBose but more often than not she tries to do the same cute and quirky comedic performance that Kristen Bell did as Anna in the Frozen films and it worked there because Bell came from a comedic background for the most part whereas here DeBose who was so swoon worthy and charismatic in West Side Story just feels like a flopping fish with all her spritzing comic lines that fall flat and leave blood on the footpath, as for Chris Pine he does what little he can but the turn from good to bad really doesn’t work and he can’t make it work.

As for the sidekick characters, the talking goat gets very annoying very quickly as it more or less spouts the same ponderous and insufferable piffle that half the cast exposited over and over and over again in A Wrinkle in Time while the little star creature is okay but doesn’t really standout like say Abu did in Aladdin.

Which leads me to my third point and that is the storytelling which is a complete mess to sit through at only 95 smegging minutes, while your sitting there watching it you feel like your watching an AI generation of the rough treatment for the film that would be shown before smart studio executives like Jeffrey Katzenberg from the Renaissance era would look at it and go “this is a mess, redo this” (and Jeffrey did just that on Aladdin by the way) and that treatment jumps from one storyline to another and one character moment to another in such a haphazard way that none of it feels organic or thought through properly.

Okay say you have Magnifico as the villain well why not have him be bad like Maleficent or Jafar or Hades were right from the get-go and establish his goal to become all powerful and rule the kingdom, Asha could be the young heroine like Belle or Ariel who wants more out of life be it the stuff that is neat and makes her collection complete or wants adventure in the great wide somewhere but instead we get what we get and the film suffers as a result.

And lastly the music here feels too taped on and not organically connected to the main body of the film like the songs of Howard Ashman and Alan Menken did in Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin (which Sir Tim Rice was determined to do when he worked with Alan after Howard passed away) and again they feel like an AI generation of early demos before they would be worked on some more and they just come into the film and then go again.

And so that was Wish and it is easily one of my Turkeys of the year and I have felt this for a while now but now feel it in my bones that Disney desperately needs another Jeffrey Katzenberg to take the helm and succeed Bob Iger for while Jeffrey had his faults (insisting When Love is Gone be cut from the Muppets Christmas Carol was a colossal error) he wasn’t afraid to ruffle the feather, make his talent fight for and defend their ideas and crack the whip when needed, perhaps then Disney can get out of this rut their in and get back to giving us great films again but perhaps the old saying of the bigger you are the harder you fall has never felt as true as it does with Disney right now, 1 out of 5.

Film Review - Wonka (2023)

Wonka is the new film by Paddington director Paul King and Timothee Chalamet stars as a young Willy Wonka who travels by boat to sell his magical chocolate in France only to find himself stuck in a laundrette run by Olivia Coleman, he also faces stiff competition from rival chocolate sellers (Paterson Joseph, Matt Lucas and Matthew Baynton) who want to keep all the chocolate sales to themselves.

Going into Wonka I was apprehensive mainly because Gene Wilder made Willy Wonka his own in the 1971 film (which Warner Brothers actually inherited from Paramount as it was such a flop for them in 1971 that a few years later they sold the film to WB who then turned it into the cult classic it became) that when Tim Burton and Johnny Depp made their film in 2005 it was a near total disaster but Paddington proved King could do great family films so was this a nice bite of chocolate or too sweet for some teeth.

Well this is happily the former as this film is terrific fun in a cinema, for much of the time I had a big smile on my face and was caught up in the sweet nature of the film, Chalamet (soon to be seen as Paul Muadib Atredies, Duke of Arakkis in Dune Part 2: Long Live the Fighters) much like Tom Blyth recently did in the Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes manages to find a way to make his Wonka his own character while also giving you enough hints of the Gene Wilder version the character would later become.

He also has a great supporting cast to work with as well, Coleman/Joseph/Lucas and Baynton make for a great group of villains and like Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant in the Paddington films they are so much fun to watch and it really makes me wish for the days when Disney Animation gave us great villains in their films, Sally Hawkins is always good to see and Keegan Michael-Key is a lot of fun as the police captain but the show stealer here is Hugh Grant as the Oompa Loompa Wonka comes across.

He's not in the film a huge amount but when he comes on screen I was grinning from ear to ear and at times thinking of the Grunka Lunka parody from the Futurama episode Fry and the Slurm Factory.

And lastly this movie is more of a musical than the previews showed you and the songs are quite good with a good mix of new songs and some old treats one of which made me emotional in my cinema seat while the other put a big smile on my face.

And so that was Wonka and it is some of the most fun I’ve had in a cinema all year, its fun/heartfelt/whimsical and so much more than I thought it would be, 4 out of 5.