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143: The Best Films of 2022

January 3, 2023
Notes
Transcript
Sonny Bunch (The Bulwark), Alyssa Rosenberg (The Washington Post), and Peter Suderman (Reason) ring in 2023 by looking back at 2022. What were their 10 (or so!) favorite films of last year?
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors and omissions. Ironically, the transcription service has particular problems with the word “bulwark,” so you may see it mangled as “Bullard,” “Boulart,” or even “bull word.” Enjoy!
  • Speaker 1
    0:00:11

    Welcome back to across the movie. I’ll present it by Bulwark class. I am your host, Sunny Bunch, Culture Editor of The Bulwark. I’m joined as always by Alyssa Rosenberg of The and post Peter Suderman of Reason magazine. Alyssa Peter, how are you today?
  • Speaker 2
    0:00:22

    I’m well.
  • Speaker 3
    0:00:23

    I am happy to be talking about the year end movies. With friends.
  • Speaker 1
    0:00:28

    You know, I have been doing this long enough to know that all such lists as the lists we are about to tell you are at best provisional. We’re doing our top ten of the year twenty twenty two AD, but we have no idea what we’ll hold up by twenty thirty two AD or ordered twenty twenty three AD, frankly. There’s movies on this list that I might never think about again. I’ve looked back at some of my list and have found such pictures that it happens. It happens.
  • Speaker 1
    0:00:53

    You know, perhaps I’ll regret leaving Avatar the way of water off of my list this year. I kinda doubt it. I think there’s a much better chance that I will regret leaving Jackass forever off this list, though. Again, it’s hard to say if that movie will play out of the theater as well as it played in the theater. I’ve also privileged theatrical releases on my list I’m I’m not going to speak for Peter or Alyssa.
  • Speaker 1
    0:01:12

    I don’t know what they’re we haven’t seen each other’s list yet. We don’t know what our favorite movies of the year are, but I tend to price theatrical just because, you know, watching movies on TV is not the same. It’s just not the same. The one, except of this rule this year has been the realm of animation. Most of the big animated films in theaters were, frankly, crap.
  • Speaker 1
    0:01:32

    But on the streaming services, you had some great stuff. Guillermo del Toro’s pinocchio is just beautiful. We talked about this on the show. It’s great. Phil Tippett, master stop motion animator has a movie out called Mad God that is insane and horrifying and grotesque but also genius.
  • Speaker 1
    0:01:47

    Richard Linklater’s Apollo ten and a half is a lovely bit of rotoscope nostalgia. Beavers and Budhead do the universe was a lot of fun. Bob’s burgers, I saw that in theaters. I’m not a connoisseur of the show, but I enjoyed it. Maybe I should check it out.
  • Speaker 1
    0:01:59

    And it’s also been a pretty good year for horror. I’ll talk about this a little more on the list, but, you know, movies like orphan first kill, the menu, smile, terrifier to the year of horror and horror Jason stuff has been great. I don’t know about you guys. I’m curious to see how your wish to take out. This is the first year in a long time where I did not even consider a comic book blockbuster for this list.
  • Speaker 1
    0:02:20

    Just didn’t have any on it and, like, didn’t even think to include any on it, which, you know, on the one hand, thinks it makes me think maybe they are finally creatively exhausted and bankrupt. On the other hand, five of the top ten movies of the year are comic book movies, so probably not. We’ll see we’ll see how that goes. But we are headed into the list now. Peter, what was your
  • Speaker 3
    0:02:43

    number ten movie on the year? Body’s bodies, bodies. It’s mean, it’s funny, It’s not perfect, but I actually I put it on my list and I wanted to get it into this into the top ten list. In some ways, it’s not the best movie that I saw this year, but I think it might be at the bleeding edge of a revolution because it is a it is a movie that comes from a perspective that just sort of assumes in a a huge amount of sort of online speech culture in a way that I don’t think I’ve ever seen represented at all, much less quite well on screen before. And I suspect that the next generation of filmmakers, that younger filmmakers are going to make movies about the weird ways that online speech have has evolved and and all of the sort of weird cultural tics and hang ups about it.
  • Speaker 3
    0:03:31

    And body’s body’s body’s is I think pretty effective at what it does. It’s just pleasantly nasty in a way that I really appreciate it. It’s there’s no heroes in this movie, and everybody sort of turns out to be kind of awful. And I just I really enjoyed the way that it skewered online speech culture from a place of knowingness. Right?
  • Speaker 3
    0:03:49

    Like, it actually seemed to understand what it was talking about in a way that I think a lot of the kind of arch satire stuff, you know, sort of that comes at this often made by older filmmakers or sort of older writers. A lot of that stuff just sort of doesn’t seem to doesn’t seem to have actually marinated in the weirdness of Twitter and Instagram and sort of and lives lived entirely through social media.
  • Speaker 1
    0:04:10

    Alyssa, what is your number ten movie?
  • Speaker 2
    0:04:13

    With my usual caveat that I hate doing top ten lists and did this only for Peter and Sunny because I love them and that I revised this like twice well you know, in the immediate run up to this, and we’ll cheat. My number ten is Pinocchio, which I thought was both incredibly beautiful and a really wrenching movie about flawed parents and flawed children and the ways that they find to accommodate and love each other.
  • Speaker 1
    0:04:37

    You were literally rewriting it as we started the show. I mean,
  • Speaker 2
    0:04:40

    that’s it.
  • Speaker 1
    0:04:41

    It’s worth it’s worth mentioning that to folks to to let them know. Number ten for me is Michael Bay’s ambulance. There’s something very pleasing about his commitment to blowing stuff up with real explosives. The drone camera work in this movie is a real reminder that we are, like, headed toward a new visual language for movie making that Michael Bay has not mastered, shall we say, in this movie or figured out how to kind of cut it together to make it make sense with everything else. But it’s coming.
  • Speaker 1
    0:05:09

    It’s coming and this is going to be a movie that is I think studied in film classes at some point in the future as a bleeding edge. Primarily, it’s also a it’s a Michael Bay movie that that in which the characters joke about other Michael Bay movies. No one can ever accuse him of not being self aware folks. And that is that
  • Speaker 3
    0:05:27

    counts for something. Alright. Peter, what is your number nine? The menu. It’s a sharp horror thriller that is in some sense a class satire I’m very I mean, very much it is a class set tire, but I think even more than that it’s doing something that you I didn’t fully expect from this movie, which is that it is a movie about the demands of art and the ways that in which obsession with aesthetics can can kind of ruin and and sap the the pleasure out of out of art and out of creation.
  • Speaker 3
    0:05:57

    And so it’s just a much smarter, more effective, you know, sort of horror thriller satire than I expected going in. And it actually takes it also takes its food very very seriously in a way that I really appreciate it.
  • Speaker 1
    0:06:10

    I it it just missed my list, but I like the the menu a lot as well. Folks should check it out if they haven’t seen it. I’m
  • Speaker 2
    0:06:15

    excited to see it.
  • Speaker 1
    0:06:16

    Alyssa, what was your number nine?
  • Speaker 2
    0:06:18

    A two way tie between Blonde and Elvis, two ganzo crazy sort of biopic that are anchored by really strong central performances, one of which was, you know, incredibly controversial, one of which was incredibly popular. But both of which, I think, you know, looked visually great and have really stuck with me. That’s
  • Speaker 1
    0:06:39

    interesting. I’m I’m kinda surprised you have blonde on this list. Yeah.
  • Speaker 2
    0:06:42

    I kinda I kinda loved blond. I have not written about it yet, although I have a big piece that’s partially about it coming out early next year. I just I mean, I think it looks so great and feels so weird and unsettling and nasty. And, you know, in some ways like entourage is sort of I think it’s been misunderstood as something that’s sexist when it’s actually about sexism. And I just I think it’s I think it’s beautiful.
  • Speaker 2
    0:07:07

    I think it’s beautiful and really nasty, and it is really lingered with me.
  • Speaker 1
    0:07:11

    Alright. My number nine pick is Crimes of the future. Like the menu, it’s a movie about art. It’s it’s a movie about the the demands of art and what we expect from art and artists and what art and artists owe the rest of us. And what what the rest of us owe art?
  • Speaker 1
    0:07:30

    It’s it’s just a really interesting It’s a really interesting movie. It’s got some great performances, particularly from Kristen Stewart, who plays kind of a twitchy weirdo doctor who was obsessed with the self mutilating artist in the movie as well as Leah Sidhu, who is wonderful in this as in everything. So crimes of the future is my number nine. Number eight, Peter. Top gun
  • Speaker 3
    0:07:53

    Maverick. It’s incredibly effective crowd pleaser driven by truly incredible footage of Tom Cruise and a bunch of other movie stars actually flying in fighter planes. Like, this is what I want from a summer movie. This it’s a nearly perfect blockbuster. I think I was left just a little colder by this film than some other people who really sort of like, if there was something about it that I felt was a little bit distancing, And I think that’s that’s something that has happened to me with Joseph Kucinski’s films before where I find them really aesthetically pleasing.
  • Speaker 3
    0:08:25

    I think this is his because it’s his best movie. But but still, like, it’s it’s just it’s really great for what it is. I don’t know that it’s a great movie, but come on. Tom Cruise. In a in a fighter jet experiencing real g’s flying over the desert, like, barely a, you know, the the airplane’s wingspan above the desert like, that’s that’s what you pay your fifteen bucks for.
  • Speaker 3
    0:08:49

    That’s that’s a summer movie. That’s good. Tom cruise risking his life for our entertainment is a public trust. Alyssa,
  • Speaker 1
    0:08:57

    what’s your number eight? Teen
  • Speaker 2
    0:08:58

    girls gone wild in turning red, Kath and called Birdie and Prey. Each of which are How many
  • Speaker 3
    0:09:03

    movies are on your top to head list? Hey.
  • Speaker 2
    0:09:06

    I told you I hate this and I cheat, but I only I am willing to accommodate myself only so far because I love you all. I think, you know, turning red got caught up in controversy and, you know, was an unfortunate casualty of a big shake pick, sending it directly to Disney plus It’s more of a teen movie than most, like, Disney animated movies, but it’s, like, great and horny and weird and along with everything everywhere all at once is one of the two great movies about mother daughter relationships this year. Catherine Hall Birdie had interestingly, like, some of the best, most nuanced depictions of birth that I’ve ever seen in a movie, but also it’s just, like, incredibly funny and charming. And come on. Like, all of us should come of age by stalking and killing a predator in the American West.
  • Speaker 1
    0:09:49

    Alright. My number eight is thirteen lives, which is Ron Howard’s movie about the rescue of the the boys trapped in the cave in Thailand? He is, you know, look, he is the master of the nuts and bolts rescue narrative right Apollo eleven is like the all time great. Example of this, thirteen lives is a just another really fantastic movie in that vein. It’s one of the few that I watched at home that I found really effective, and I’m frankly glad I did not go see it in a theater because it’s the most closter phobic movie I’ve seen in a long time probably since the descent.
  • Speaker 1
    0:10:22

    I don’t know if you guys ever saw the descent, but that’s a movie about cave splunking where monsters show up terrifying. And this is equally terrifying even without the monsters just like the un the unforgiving nature of cave diving and oxygen tanks and being underwater and drowning. There’s constant threat of drowning. Terrifying, but very good. Thirteen lines, Ron Howard, it’s on Prime Video.
  • Speaker 1
    0:10:48

    Check it out. Alright. Number seven. Number seven. What what’s your numbers of
  • Speaker 3
    0:10:52

    a movie? Beer. Nope. It’s audacious and strange and thematically complex movie about aliens and outsiders some of the most unusual imagery I’ve seen all year. Just a really great big screen experience that that stuck with me and that just some of the some of this the alien imagery from the very end of that film has just sort of pops in my brain, you know, without as I’m looking up at the sky.
  • Speaker 3
    0:11:20

    I don’t think the movie quite succeeded at being for clouds what Jaws was for the ocean, which is what Jordan Peale suggested he he was trying to make at one point. But it’s It’s a very good movie. I actually been think been meaning to go back and and watch again. I
  • Speaker 1
    0:11:36

    rewatched it last week. It’s not on my list. It has its moments. It but it it definitely like, I feel like the script needed one more pass. It just needed it wasn’t quite there.
  • Speaker 1
    0:11:49

    Thematically, but not my list, Peter’s list. Alyssa, what is your number seven deck? The
  • Speaker 2
    0:11:55

    Fablebens, which is self indulgent, But if anyone has earned the right to be self indulgent, it’s Steven Spielberg. And for much of the movie, it works as he wrestles with the incredibly complicated relationship with his parents and his own development as someone who watches and manipulates. That’s a
  • Speaker 1
    0:12:12

    good way to describe that movie. Someone who watches and manipulates that that feels about right. Alright. My number seven pick is ethanol, which is, you know, it’s it’s a move. It’s on Netflix.
  • Speaker 1
    0:12:23

    This is the only other, I think, non theatrical movie on my list. But it you know, it’s it’s a movie that has really interesting cinematography. The whole the whole stitch together long take thing is kind of played out at this point, but these this movie is so incredibly tense and, like, well done that I I think it earns it earns it. And I also just I love the ambivalence at the of this film, there’s we live in an age of real political stridancy. And this movie daring to say, like, maybe things aren’t quite as cut and dry as everybody wants them to be is a again, it’s like it’s a little refreshing.
  • Speaker 1
    0:13:04

    My friend Ali Eri Khan described it ascentrism, The Movie, and I have loved that description ever since I heard it. So Athena. Mine
  • Speaker 3
    0:13:13

    number seven. Number six, Peter. Avatar the way of water. I hate three d. I hate high frame rate photography.
  • Speaker 3
    0:13:20

    And I didn’t particularly love the first Avatar. But boy, this one just did it for me. It’s an immersive cinematic experience unlike anything else I’ve ever encountered, just three hours of of deep engagement with cinema in a way that I I don’t think any other movie this year drew me in the same way. Alyssa,
  • Speaker 1
    0:13:44

    what is your number six pick?
  • Speaker 2
    0:13:45

    Kimi, a the fact that Steven Soderberg can just sort of like knock out the number six movie on my list for The year is an example of why Stephen Soderberg may be my favorite living filmmaker, but this claustrophobic tech horror movie starring Zoey Kravitz as an agorific content moderator whose anxieties have been heightened by the COVID nineteen pandemic is one of the first really sharp looks at what our smart technology is going to do to us and what it does to the people who make it combo for the rest of us. It’s
  • Speaker 1
    0:14:22

    funny I had completely forgotten that that came out this year. It’s a good movie, and I I would’ve I should’ve I should’ve put it on my list too, but I didn’t So this is why Alyssa wins. Because she picked seventeen movies on her top ten. It’s not fair. Alright.
  • Speaker 1
    0:14:35

    Number six for me was Barbarian. One of the wildest movies I’ve ever seen in a theater. I have no idea how it’s gonna play at home. I may never watch this again at home, frankly, just so I can privilege the experience. Of sitting there in a theater watching this thing unspool as people are just like kind of constantly snorting and looking around to see if we’re all watching the same insane things happening on screen at the same time.
  • Speaker 1
    0:14:58

    I love barbarian. Highly recommend traveling back in time and watching it in a theater on opening weekend. You should do that. Instead of watching it
  • Speaker 3
    0:15:05

    at home. Peter, what is your number five pick? Athena, like Sunny. I loved it. If only for the long take, and particularly the one that starts the movie.
  • Speaker 3
    0:15:15

    It’s a siege film for the modern era with a sneaky kind of politics and some just really stunning visuals it’s one of the most as a sort of moderate you know, it’s not maybe not a big budget not small budget. But, like, modestly budgeted films go. It probably has the most interesting technical filmmaking in it of anything I saw this year.
  • Speaker 1
    0:15:40

    Listen.
  • Speaker 3
    0:15:41

    Top
  • Speaker 2
    0:15:41

    gun fabric with is a big old slice of American cheese served up perfectly and just executed beautifully by everyone involved in it. Sunny is, of course, right, than Maverick is in purgatory. But while he’s there, he manages to give us a good old fashioned just movie about what what it means to be an adult, what it means to be in love, what it means to take care of other people just beautifully done top to bottom. Really enjoyed it. My
  • Speaker 1
    0:16:06

    number five is the banshees of Inishiren. It’s Martin McDonough’s movie about friendships that are broken and the Irish Civil War and and all that. You know, his in brooj remains, from my point of view, one of the best films of the two thousands. It’s when I revisit semi regularly and think about just a lot, just what what is happening in that film. But I I feel like he has lost his he had lost his way a little bit.
  • Speaker 1
    0:16:32

    I mean, seven psychopaths is is is kind of good, but it’s very insular, very meta, too better for my taste. Three billboards outside Evan Missouri was kind of a messy slog with again, some nice performances, some nice moments, but did not did not really work as as a as a picture in and of itself. But the banshee is a min assurance. It’s just hauntingly beautiful. It’s a wonderfully intimate look at the way friendships can go south and sour.
  • Speaker 1
    0:16:58

    And I hope that Carrie Condon, more than even Colin Farrell or Brennan Gleeson, winds up getting some some notice from this film because she is just doing career best work. I’ve loved her ever since Rome. I think she’s great here. And that’s my number five movie. Number four,
  • Speaker 2
    0:17:15

    Peter. The
  • Speaker 3
    0:17:16

    bench, she’s a bit a share. Yay. My number four. Yeah. It’s I agree with everything Sonny said.
  • Speaker 3
    0:17:20

    It’s a gorgeous somber funny film about what kindness demands of us. About friendship and art. It has, I think, the best dialogue of any movie I’ve seen this year and some of the best performances. Listen.
  • Speaker 2
    0:17:32

    Athena, which in addition to all of the sort of wonderful tactical things you’d mentioned, is just a searing portrait of how grief works within an individual family.
  • Speaker 1
    0:17:42

    My number four movie of the year is body’s body’s bodies for many of the reasons that Peter said, but you know, it’s a, extremely funny and b extremely mean. But also, I there’s an interesting little thing here that, you
  • Speaker 2
    0:17:56

    know, I don’t
  • Speaker 1
    0:17:58

    I don’t wanna I don’t wanna sound like I’m piling on conservatives. But, you know, conservatives when they try to make movies or or, you know, TV shows or even websites making fun of Liberals. They they tend to not do a very good job of it. And I think this movie kind of gets at one of the reasons why you really have to be immersed in this culture and part of it and kind of love it to really skewer it well. You see it here and also in the d columnativization episode of reservation dogs.
  • Speaker 1
    0:18:27

    Which is just a a a pitch perfect skewing of liberal progressive pioneeries, and Gen Z like nonsense. Speak. Both of which are made again by, like, people who I don’t think anyone would doubt their progressive bona fides. They are the two funniest skewing of skew rings of the left I’ve seen this year. Alright.
  • Speaker 3
    0:18:47

    Peter number three, decision to leave. It’s the latest movie from Park Chinook. We didn’t cover it on this on this podcast, but it’s phenomenal. It’s stylish, dark, haunting, a mystery about the nature of mysteries, including the deepest mystery of all, why other people do the things they do.
  • Speaker 2
    0:19:04

    What’s the what’s
  • Speaker 1
    0:19:05

    the answer? What’s the answer to that? The answer
  • Speaker 3
    0:19:08

    is you’ll never know. Oh, okay. That’s how you should watch the movie. That’s But it’s really it’s it’s phenomenal. It’s I mean, it’s it’s just incredibly stylish.
  • Speaker 3
    0:19:16

    And it takes the the mystery genre and does some really interesting things with
  • Speaker 1
    0:19:22

    it. Alyssa, what’s your number three? So
  • Speaker 2
    0:19:25

    my top three movies are all films that were like nothing I’d ever seen on the screen before. And coming in third place for that is Avatar The Wave of Water, which is that movie just blew my mind visually. Right? I mean, that’s the only movie this year where I came home from a late night, very far away screening, and it was just too amped up to sleep by what I had just seen. The plot has its flaws, but the sort of weird combination of elements in it is more appealing than you might think.
  • Speaker 2
    0:19:55

    And I think Kate Winslet’s pregnant Warrior Grump is perhaps one of my favorite film characters this year. I just really enjoyed her. I
  • Speaker 1
    0:20:02

    my number three is Top Gun Maverick for all the reasons everybody has discussed so far. I mean, look, it’s it is both the best reviewed movie of the year. I think it’s ninety nine percent fresh on rotten tomatoes from top critics. And it is ninety nine percent fresh from audiences. So it’s it is beloved by critics and audiences alike.
  • Speaker 1
    0:20:22

    It made a huge enormous amount of money, and it did so without having to do any you know, cow telling to China, which I’m a big fan of. But also, I mean, look, this is just a big, big screen movie. It is, I think, the sort of movie that that shows why theaters matter, why the studios should not abandon them. And if the look, I’m I don’t it’s obviously not my number one film of the year, I still have two films left. But it is the movie that should play in best picture if the Academy Awards if they have any sense of self preservation because, you know, if if not if not top down Maverick, then what what reason are people going to movie theaters for?
  • Speaker 1
    0:21:01

    So that’s that. Number two, Peter. Everything
  • Speaker 3
    0:21:04

    everywhere all at once. So I’m putting this at number two, but it’s also my favorite movie of the year, Per really. And I I will distinguish my favorite from the best here because this one, I I think, is it’s an incredibly good move. Right? It’s a very well made movie.
  • Speaker 3
    0:21:20

    It’s just a kind of glorious genre mashup of Pixar and Jackie Chan in two thousand one a space odyssey, Wong car y and who knows what else? The Daniels put it all in a blender and made the best movie smoothie I’ve maybe ever seen. Right? And and it’s also somehow tremendously, emotionally affecting just really heartwarming without being cloying or saccharin works on every single level. The kind of movie that I think, you know, is it is it’s modestly budgeted, but it’s but it’s really impressive with what they managed to do with I think something like fifteen million dollars, maybe not even that.
  • Speaker 3
    0:21:58

    And it’s also the kind of movie that I think is we’re gonna see more of in the future because this is a movie that’s that simply takes for granted a deep media saturation and the ability to follow multiple strands of of ideas and sort of see the connections between them. Right? And it’s almost like being on social media and seeing, you know, all of these sort of fragmented things and then starting to see starting to see the ways they’re all telling the same story. And that’s something that I don’t think I’ve ever seen done maybe at all, but certainly not done this well. This is the movie that hit me personally the hardest of all the movies that were released this year.
  • Speaker 3
    0:22:36

    This is the one that I expect to watch again and again and again the most number of times. Oh, listen.
  • Speaker 1
    0:22:42

    Number two. Everything
  • Speaker 2
    0:22:42

    everywhere all at once, which in addition to everything Peter’s mentioned, is just anchored by four outstanding performance Right? I mean, each playing a character that you have never quite seen on the screen before. You have Michelle Yeoh as the sort of disaffected kind of ADD, Evelyn Wang, who is really hurting her family by refusing to be present for them. And to see them and take them as they are. You have Stephanie Sue as her depressed daughter who is, despite the fact that she you know, has a good relationship is sort of trying to build a life outside of her family.
  • Speaker 2
    0:23:17

    It’s just desperate for her mother’s love. Kaye Kwan Man I mean, I know that everyone got super into Brendan Fraser’s comeback story. But, you know, these moments when you see an who has been wasted by his industry, come in and just play an action star, play a, you know, wounded sensitive father who is resorting to filing for divorce because it’s the only way to his wife’s attention. Playing, you know, a suave Hong Kong industrialist just doing all of it in a single movie. He’s just unbelievable.
  • Speaker 2
    0:23:54

    And then Jimmy Curtis as, you know, all the alternate universe versions of an IRS auditor who somehow ends up being sympathetic given American politics that might be the most extraordinary feat in the movie. You know, there is so much happening on screen, but the best special effect is those four actors faces and all the things they do with them.
  • Speaker 1
    0:24:16

    Also my number two of the year, which makes me wonder if we have a number two and number one convergence this year. But everything everywhere all at once is great. I I haven’t felt this way coming out of a theater since the matrix back in nineteen ninety nine, which is saying something. I mean, it just it hit me it hit me in ways I did not expect. As Peter said, I think it’s probably the movie I will end up watching the most number of times over the next, you know, ten to twenty years, even if it is not necessarily the best movie of the year, which brings us to the best movie of the year.
  • Speaker 1
    0:24:47

    Which, again, I think I I have some idea of where we’re all landing here. Peter,
  • Speaker 3
    0:24:54

    Did we how did this happen? So we we definitely I just want listeners to understand. We intentionally withheld our picks from each other. We didn’t talk about this not even like a month ago. I mean, like, we’ve talked about movies for the whole year, but we didn’t go into this thinking that we were all gonna pick everything everywhere all at once for the number two.
  • Speaker 3
    0:25:13

    And all picked Tar as the best movie. We are all obviously picking Tar as the best movie the year because it is a masterful exercise in cinematic control. Just not a single false note, not a single shot or cut out of place. This is, like, when people say toward a force, this is what this is the movie that that phrase was invented for. It is a tour de force of of of movie making, built around not just the single best performance of the year, but one of the best performances I have ever seen on screen period.
  • Speaker 3
    0:25:44

    I, like, parts of me like, I wanna call this the best performer, you know, Kate Blanchard in this movie. Wanna call it the best performance I have ever seen. I’m not quite sure if I think that’s correct. I need to see this movie a couple more times before I’m gonna make that judgment, but it’s certainly in the running. Just just a a a character who lives and breathes and has complexity and depth in a way that I you all that I I’ve not sure I’ve ever seen before on screen.
  • Speaker 3
    0:26:08

    And that’s that’s what movies are for, is to make fiction real. Right? To make people real even though they’re not. And to this this movie feels like it’s a true story. Right?
  • Speaker 3
    0:26:19

    It has this sort of it it feels like it’s been adapted from from a New Yorker article. It feels like it is something that is ripped out of the real world and yet it is completely invented. And that’s I think part of its power is that the story of Lydia Tarr has been imagined from whole cloth and yet somehow or another feels so textured and so well developed and so slightly captured and portrayed that it seems as if it is a real story that we have to think about in the ways that we think about truth and and true stories in our lives. It is It’s just a masterpiece in every way.
  • Speaker 2
    0:26:53

    Obviously, I picked Char as the best movie of the year. Like, there’s not a question. In addition to all the things that Peter said, Tar feels like a real thing that is happening in spite and in some cases because of its surrealistic element. Right? I mean, it is a movie that is so thoroughly convincing that you can essentially news elements of a ghost story, a haunting.
  • Speaker 2
    0:27:17

    The Black Dog of Fate showing up in an abandoned Berlin, you know, apartment building, a disappearing cellist, a, you know, sort of strange coda at I think of the enemy as a anime convention. And yet you thoroughly believe it. In the same way that James Cameron used cinematic innovation to make Pandora real, Kate Plancia performance, but also Togfield’s direction and script make a world that doesn’t quite hang together that has these sort of odd notes you know, entirely work. And, you know, it’s not Blenched is unbelievable on this. Right?
  • Speaker 2
    0:27:58

    Obviously, but, you know, Nina Haas, Nomi Merlin, Sophie Cower, you know, as these sort of four women at the core of this story. I mean Nina Haas, in particular, as a character who is sort of playing a role within a role. Right? Someone who has adopted this kind of fragile persona as part of the power dynamic she and her wife have obviously and very self consciously adopted, who then drops the facade as an act of devastating moral judgment towards the end of the movie, is she’s just unbelievable in this. And this is one of those movies we’re saying that doesn’t take anything away from Blanchett, but I I just think that the work of the other women in the movie is, you know, the film Blanchett carries so much of this, but the film’s perfection would not be possible without the work of the actresses who surround her.
  • Speaker 2
    0:28:47

    Yeah. I mean,
  • Speaker 1
    0:28:49

    I also went with the movie about a Me Too scandal, you know, anchored by strong female performances to really shine a light on modern that’s our She said, my number one movie of the year. I wouldn’t. She’s no. I I don’t know how this happened. How did I don’t know how we all settled on par except for the fact that it is actively the best movie of the year.
  • Speaker 1
    0:29:09

    Everyone should go see it. It should not win best picture at the Oscars because if they give best picture to a movie that gross five million dollars in theaters they deserve to all be bankrupt
  • Speaker 3
    0:29:18

    and go out of business. Wait. Isn’t the Oscar aren’t the Oscar supposed to objectively measure quality? No.
  • Speaker 1
    0:29:24

    Nope. That’s not because it’s a trade show. It’s not an actual award show. It’s a trade show. It’s not the Pulitzer’s.
  • Speaker 1
    0:29:30

    You know what? Nobody cares about the Pulitzer for literature except for the seven people who read novels. It is it it’s a trade show. They need to reward Top Gun Maverick, but tar number number one movie of the year from my point of view, because I’m not a part of the industry trade show. I I am I’m my own man.
  • Speaker 1
    0:29:45

    Hold in to nobody. Except for you too, that’s why I picked exactly the same movies as you as the top two of the year. So So for listeners
  • Speaker 3
    0:29:56

    who who may not remember, this something like this happened last year where we all three independently picked Pig as the best movie of the year. And the hive mind thing here is somewhat concerning. That’s that is what it is. That is what it is. I’m a little surprised no one put three thousand years of longing on
  • Speaker 1
    0:30:12

    their list. I
  • Speaker 2
    0:30:12

    thought about it. I did think about it. The thing that kept it off the list for me is that the parts of the film that are Tildoswynin and the Edras alba talking are sensational and stayed in my mind more than the actual anecdotes in between. I mean,
  • Speaker 1
    0:30:26

    I like, it’s it’s interesting just looking back through the list of movies this year. There there’s not a ton of stuff on here that, like, I would have definitely that I was just really, you know, loathed to keep off the
  • Speaker 2
    0:30:39

    off the
  • Speaker 1
    0:30:40

    year end list. I mean, even movies I liked and gave pretty positive reviews to, like Elvis, like, I’ve that’s, you know, it’s fine, but I I wouldn’t Yeah.
  • Speaker 3
    0:30:49

    Three thousand years was the only movie that I thought someone should have mentioned that we didn’t talk about here. And
  • Speaker 1
    0:30:55

    that we mentioned.
  • Speaker 3
    0:30:55

    Others But now we’ve now we’ve
  • Speaker 1
    0:30:57

    come together. Yeah. I
  • Speaker 3
    0:30:58

    I wanted to get Kimi and Barbarian on my list, but I wasn’t willing to cheat, like, Alyssa, cheat our Cheater. You know?
  • Speaker 1
    0:31:04

    Cheater
  • Speaker 2
    0:31:05

    Cheater. I’d be if I’m gonna be four if I’m gonna be forced into this exercise, I’m Cheater Cheater
  • Speaker 1
    0:31:09

    pumpkin eater. Alright. That’s it for this week show. Make sure to swing by a t m a dot forward dot on for all our episodes, make sure to tell your friends, strong recommendation from a friend is basically the only way to grow podcast audiences. We don’t grow, we’ll die.
  • Speaker 1
    0:31:21

    If you did not love two days episode, please something to me on for turn at Honeywell dot com and show that it is in fact the best show in your podcast speed. See you guys next week.
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