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Doctor of Movies’ Top Ten of 2024
It felt like a quieter year for the movies in 2024. While global box office takings appear to have increased, 2024 cinema didn’t have a Barbenheimer-style pop culture defining moment – despite the promotional teams for Wicked trying very hard to fabricate one. What the global box office does speak to is a cinematic landscape that continues to shift and change in search of its position in the new entertainment landscape. Existing IP remains the key strategy, with Red One and IF the only films in the top 25 grossing films in the world that are not sequels, remakes or adaptations. We saw the continued decline of the superhero movie after two decades as the dominant blockbuster force, with the second year in a row of only two superhero movies – Deadpool & Wolverine (which was ok) and Venom: The Last Dance (which was not good) – cracking the global box office top ten. Family animation showed that it is still the most dependable performer, with Inside Out 2 and Moana 2 performing strongly and Despicable Me 4 and Kung Fu Panda 4 doing solidly (Inside Out 2 also showed that Pixar is still very much a drawcard when Disney doesn’t shoot themselves in the foot by sending them straight to Disney+). Wicked confirmed that the non-animated musical genre has returned as a legitimate blockbuster form, while Joker: Folie à Deux (which I kind of liked)showed that if you are going to make a sequel that is openly antagonistic to the audience that made your first film a massive hit then you probably shouldn’t inflate the budget with massive salary raises.
Continue readingDoctor of Movies’ Top Ten of 2023
2023 was a fascinating year to be an observer of the film industry. With the pandemic in the rearview mirror, there was a new normal to be established. Through extended strike action, we saw the writers and actors guilds win important protections not just against the coming influence of A.I., but the industry’s economic shift toward streaming rather than theatrical release as its focal point. We saw the once great studio Warner Brothers further destroy its reputation by continuing to shelve already completed films for tax write-offs. We saw Marvel Studios stumble for the first time, seemingly having over-saturated and exhausted their audience. And while big I.P. franchise pieces from DC, Marvel, Pixar and Disney failed to meet expectations, the Barbenheimer phenomenon created a level of broad excitement about going to the movies that hadn’t been seen for a decade. Depending on how the industry responds to all of the above, it could end up being an historically significant year.
Continue readingDoctor of Movies’ Top Ten of 2022
The Doctor of Movies blog went a bit quiet in 2022. Work and life meant that I didn’t have the capacity to be regularly writing reviews, so I gave myself a pass. That didn’t mean I wasn’t watching movies though. I set myself a challenge this year: each week I would try and watch at least one new release film, one older film that I hadn’t seen before, and one rewatch. I ended up doing a bit more than that most weeks with the result being that I ended up watching 270 films for the year, including 80 new releases.
Continue readingReview – Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)
Director: Patty Jenkins
Starring: Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Kristen Wiig, Pedro Pascal
In a year that has been, for obvious reasons, almost entirely devoid of genuine blockbusters, Wonder Woman 1984 emerged as a Christmas present for moviegoers desperate for some good, old fashioned, big screen spectacle. Warner Brothers decided, having sat on the film since its originally slated June release date, to take the plunge and simultaneously release it in cinemas and on their streaming service, HBO Max. As a beacon of hope and goodness in a genre largely populated by cynical wise-guys, it is fitting Wonder Woman is the character to try and draw audiences back to the multiplex. She’s the right hero for now. Unfortunately, Wonder Woman 1984 isn’t quite the right film, struggling to recapture the magic of the original.
Continue readingVideo Analysis – Breaking Down the Classical Hollywood Style
While a year of pandemic induced teaching online has resulted in slightly less time for writing reviews here, it has seen me recording a lot more lectures and playing with the creation of video resources, doing on video what I’d usually be doing in the classroom.
Here is one in which I break down the Classical Hollywood or Continuity Style by analysing the opening scene of The Maltese Falcon.
Review – Terror Nullius (2018)
Director: Soda_Jerk
Starring: Anyone and everyone from the history of Australian cinema and politics
In the 1920s, Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov conducted a series of experiments in which the same image of a neutral male face was screened alongside different images. A bowl of soup. A child in a coffin. A reclining woman. In each instance the audience interpreted the neutral expression in a different way. The man was hungry. He was sad. He was lustful. From these experiments came one of the foundational principles of cinematic language: the meaning of shots was not static, but changed based on how those shots were arranged. This principle of meaning creation, and in particular recreation, through juxtaposition is used to startling effect in the explosive mashup piece Terror Nullius. Continue reading
Review – Get Out (2017)
Director: Jordan Peele
Starring: Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Catherine Keener, Bradley Whitford, LilRel Howery
You have to go back to The Blair Witch Project to find a horror film that has caused as much of a critical stir as Get Out. The debut feature from writer-director Jordan Peele, best known as one half of the sketch comedy duo Key and Peele, has become the surprise hit of the year, having already grossed $215 million worldwide off a budget of only $4.5 million, and has been almost universally praised as one of the year’s sharpest movies.
Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) and Rose (Allison Williams) have been dating for five months. The time has come for Rose to take Chris upstate to meet her parents, but the prospect has him wary. You see, Chris is black, and Rose, who is white, hasn’t thought to mention this to her family. Even though it has been fifty years since Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and Rose assures him that both her parents voted for Obama, Chris still thinks it could be an awkward surprise. Continue reading
Review – Florence Foster Jenkins (2016)
Director: Stephen Frears
Starring: Meryl Streep, Hugh Grant, Simon Helberg, Rebecca Ferguson
Gosh it must be fun to be Meryl Streep. The most celebrated screen actress alive has reached a point in her career where she can seemingly do whatever she wants. Not one to take herself too seriously, she appears to pick whatever projects look like fun while still producing top notch work. She has shown us she can sing with Mamma Mia!, Into the Woods and Ricki and the Flash, and now, with Florence Foster Jenkins, she has shown us, when needed, she can also sing terribly.
When gifted young pianist Cosme McMoon (Simon Helberg) is hired to play accompaniment for heiress Florence Foster Jenkins’ (Meryl Streep) daily singing lessons, he has no idea what he has got himself into. A socialite and patron of the arts, Florence is a lover of music, who just happens to be the worst singer in the world. Continue reading
Review – Mascots (2016)
Director: Christopher Guest
Starring: Zach Woods, Sarah Baker, Tom Bennett, Parker Posey, Susan Yeagley, Chris O’Dowd, Michael Hitchcock, Jane Lynch, Ed Begley Jr., Fred Willard, John Michael Higgins
As writer-performer of This is Spinal Tap, and writer-director-performer of Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show and A Mighty Wind, Christopher Guest is undoubtedly the godfather of the mockumentary (despite his open disdain for the term), and as such, the patron saint of modern television comedies like The Office, Modern Family and Parks and Recreation. So the announcement that he would be returning to the feature mockumentary for the first time in over a decade with the Netflix original film Mascots was met with excited anticipation. Unfortunately, after a long wait, Mascots doesn’t show us anything we haven’t seen before.
As the title might suggest, Mascots concerns those large fluffy characters who dance around at sporting contests to fire up the crowd. More to the point, it concerns the people behind, or rather inside, those characters. Continue reading
Review – Still Alice (2014)
Directors: Richard Glatzer, Wash Westmoreland
Starring: Julianne Moore, Alec Baldwin, Kristen Stewart, Kate Bosworth, Hunter Parrish, Stephen Kunken
Alzheimer’s is the cruellest of diseases. You lose your memories, your personality, and ultimately yourself. Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland’s Still Alice does not shy away from challenging nature of this subject matter. Coming from a novel by neuroscientist Lisa Genova, and with Glatzer himself suffering from a neurodegenerative disorder (ALS), this is an honest and highly personal film.
Dr Alice Howland (Julianne Moore) is a brilliant woman. An influential linguistics professor at Columbia University in New York, she is a powerful and confident intellectual. Shortly after her fiftieth birthday she starts to experience mental blanks, occasionally forgetting words or appointments. Suspecting something isn’t right, she visits a neurologist where, after some tests, she gets the diagnosis: early-onset Alzheimer’s.
Alice has a husband, John (Alec Baldwin), a medical researcher, and three children; Continue reading
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