2023

My 2023 in Film

It’s nearly halfway through January, so I guess I should put together my thoughts on the films I saw in 2023. Usually I limit myself to films I actually watched during the calendar year, but most years I put this list together much sooner, and it’s not like I’m going to be audited or anything. This year’s list is even more genre-heavy than usual, reflecting both my preferences and the movies I got around to seeing. As always, however, there are films I would have liked to consider that got away from me (I’m hoping to catch up with Poor Things soon). Ah, well. Even out of what I did see, putting together a list and ranking my choices poses a challenge. I know, I always say ratings and rankings are bullshit, and then I go ahead and try to do it anyway. My Letterboxd diary lists everything I watched for the first time last year, and if you care to investigate you may notice that my star ratings don’t always match this list. So take everything with a grain of salt.

Worst Movie: I usually put miscellaneous categories after the main list, but we’re here to celebrate the good films of last year, so let’s get this out of the way: Cocaine Bear (dir. Elizabeth Banks) promised a trashy, gleefully offensive good time, but it was only intermittently shocking, with the bear attacks (fueled by bags of coke dropped into its forest by bungling smugglers) stranded in a limp crime plot. The attempts to pull our heartstrings with a pair of cute/precocious kids lost in the woods just made it more insulting. There is enough big-name talent involved in this (RIP, Ray Liotta) that you’d think they would aim higher than an original you’d see on SyFy or Tubi.

Biggest Disappointment: I didn’t expect The Super Mario Bros. Movie (dir. Michael Jelenic and Aaron Horvath) to be a masterpiece, but I had higher hopes than this. Nintendo has been gun-shy about allowing adaptations of its IP since Jankel and Morton turned 1993’s Super Mario Bros. into a cyberpunk flop almost entirely divorced from the game, but this animated film veers too far in the opposite direction, with every potentially interesting choice sanded down in the name of brand management. The result is weirdly airless and a little mean, with Mario (voiced by Chris Pratt*) ushered through the beats of a hero’s journey that takes him from a put-upon plumber to savior of the Mushroom Kingdom. Poor Luigi (Charlie Day**) hardly has anything to do, just like younger siblings handed the Player 2 controller everywhere. It’s low-hanging fruit to compare a CGI animated movie to video game cut scenes, but sequences of Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy***) coaching Mario through an obstacle course and our heroes building karts for the inevitable chase make the comparison hard to avoid. Wreck-It Ralph hit these marks with a lot more grace and heart.

* ?

** Okay, this kind of works.

*** Yes, all the major characters are voiced by celebrities. At least Jack Black is having fun.

On to the ranked list:

10. One thousand years ago, the warrior Gloreth defeated a great beast, and ever since, the realm has maintained walls and an order of knights armed with high-tech weapons in case it returns. There’s a lot to like about Nimona (dir. Troy Quane and Nick Bruno): a setting that combines the contemporary and medieval in a way we don’t see on film very often, a queer perspective still rare in animation, and a strong sense of design. Add to that a compelling central character, a knight (Riz Ahmed) disgraced by a crime he wasn’t responsible for, and it starts strong. What I didn’t like very much was the title character, a bratty pink-haired girl (voiced by Chloë Grace Moretz) who attaches herself to the knight in hopes of joining his (imagined) villainy. I lived through the ‘90s, I don’t need any more edgy mascot characters with attitude. Fortunately, there is more to Nimona than the punk exterior—much more. She is a shapeshifter, a dangerous ally to have in a realm built on a foundation of paranoid fear of monsters. There is another side to the story of Gloreth and the beast, and it’s in the second half of the film, as the truth comes to light, that Nimona soars.

9. Like a lot of moviegoers, I did see both halves of the “Barbenheimer” event that gripped cinemas last summer, although I didn’t see them on the same day. Barbie (dir. Greta Gerwig) is superficially similar to The Lego Movie: it establishes the world of a beloved toy brand on its own visual and metaphysical terms, then burrows into its underlying psychology. It even features Will Ferrell as a corporate CEO, but Ferrell’s presence is a bit of misdirection, as the struggle Barbie (Margot Robbie) faces isn’t about asserting herself in the face of an overbearing father/boss figure, at least not directly. In Barbie’s world, serious political thought and nightly dance parties coexist easily, since in her multitude she is both President and DJ in addition to all the other careers she’s had over the years (multiple actresses play these different versions, all of them “Barbie,” but Robbie is the Barbie, as it were). Ken (Ryan Gosling) hangs on her every word and gesture, just hoping for a little bit of attention. Without Barbie around, it’s like he hardly exists. The plot gets rolling when Barbie starts to have disturbing, uncharacteristic thoughts—What is death? Why am I unhappy sometimes?—that shake the foundations of her perfect existence, setting her and Ken on a journey to the real world, where girl power isn’t taken for granted. Barbie comments on patriarchy, womanhood, and role models, and it sometimes threatens to buckle under the weight of so much meaning, but Robbie’s and Gosling’s performances are alternately hilarious and touching, and Robbie understands the assignment of playing a doll—essentially a cartoon character—who gradually learns what it means to be human. Think of it as Pleasantville in reverse.

8. Many science fiction films ask, “What if your entire life was a lie?” In They Cloned Tyrone (dir. Juel Taylor), small-time hood Fontaine (John Boyega) is ambushed and killed by a rival drug dealer, only to wake up in his own bed the next morning. Far from being a nightmare, his murder happened in front of other people who are surprised to see him up and about. Their investigation leads to a far-reaching conspiracy involving clones (duh), mind-controlling chemicals, and underground bunkers. On the one hand, this seems to remix beats and themes from Jordan Peele’s films (especially Get Out and Us), but without all the subtlety and ambiguity that make Peele’s movies so unsettling. On the other hand, Peele doesn’t have a trademark on black horror, and subtlety isn’t everything. Tyrone clearly has deep roots in the kind of conspiracy theorizing featured in blaxploitation movies like Three the Hard Way and parodied in Undercover Brother, and it leavens the action and weirdness with humor. Jamie Foxx as a vain, over-the-hill pimp and Teyonah Parris as one of his girls who wants more from life get most of the funny lines (as well as being active characters who keep the plot moving forward), but Boyega as a man of few words undergoing an existential crisis is the emotional center.

7. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (dir. James Gunn) brings the spacefaring subseries of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to a close, at least for now. While unable to totally escape the orbit of the larger MCU plot (particularly the replacement of Peter Quill’s lover Gamora with an angrier version of her from a different timeline who wants nothing to do with him), this installment provides as much information as is necessary for the trilogy to stand on its own. It mostly focuses on Rocket (Bradley Cooper) and finally explores his tragic history as a lab animal “uplifted” by the would-be godlike High Evolutionary before his escape. There’s a lot going on in this film as it ties up as many loose ends as it can, but it demonstrates again Gunn’s love for the weird byways in comics lore and shows why this oddball franchise has been such a good fit for him. 

6. The Dungeons & Dragons game has never been one story, but rather a premise. Places, characters, and other conventions have been part of the official materials to the point that there is a recognizable D&D world distinct from other fantasy settings, but unless you’ve played it, you might only have a vague idea of tenth-level wizards and dark elves. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (dir. John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein) brings the game to life better than any previous adaptation, deploying character types, monsters, and magic that will be familiar to fans but in a story that won’t leave non-players feeling left out. Chris Pine plays a disillusioned bard whose turn to thievery to provide a better life for his family resulted in tragedy. After finally escaping from prison with a taciturn barbarian warrior (Michelle Rodriguez), he regroups with his old comrades only to find one of them was behind the betrayal that landed him there in the first place. This is a fun, high-spirited adventure with real emotional stakes and (of course) a bigger threat to the world than is immediately apparent, giving the ragtag found family of thieves and outcasts a chance to become heroes.

5. Many of Hayao Miyazaki’s films involve work: even in the magical bathhouse of Spirited Away, those towels aren’t going to fold themselves. In The Boy and the Heron, the grief-stricken boy Mahito spends part of his sojourn in the other world catching and cleaning fish alongside a butch sailor (who, like many of the people he encounters, corresponds to someone from his regular life, but transformed). It’s not hard to read these interludes as metaphors for redemption, with the main characters finding space to work out their issues, but since I started working at a coffee shop this winter, I was struck by the literal truth of it as well. When you start a new job, you go to a strange place full of unfamiliar people and spend hours performing tasks whose meaning may only gradually become clear. Time passes slowly or quickly but with little relation to the outside world. And eventually you feel at home there and become part of the scenery for someone else. Given that Miyazaki doesn’t seem likely to ever retire, despite announcing that this would be his last movie, I think this is a feeling he knows well.

4. Where 2018’s Into the Spider-Verse introduced Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) and several spider-themed heroes from parallel dimensions, the follow-up Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (dir. Joaquim Dos Santos, Justin K. Thompson, and Kemp Powers) raises the stakes by introducing an organization of hundreds of such characters, and the real reason Miles hasn’t been invited to join them before. The eclectic, constantly-shifting animation style that made the first film so refreshing is, if anything, even more pronounced in this: as Miles and best friend Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld) spend time traveling between several different worlds, each one is rendered in a distinct visual style. The best part about this is that the trippy cosmic material is balanced by the emotional realities of the characters, their situations, and their motivations. It’s also, indirectly, an argument against the kind of schematic plot beats that make so many superhero movies tiresome, building to a daring cliffhanger ending.

3. In Suzume (dir. Makoto Shinkai), a schoolgirl follows a handsome wanderer to an abandoned town. When her curiosity leads her to open a door that releases a storm-like “dragon” and a mischievous cat spirit, she becomes entangled in his mission to keep the doors to the spirit realm closed. He also gets turned into a chair, which makes her help all the more crucial. Suzume is, obviously, a rather odd movie, but the magical realist plot turns are balanced by down-to-earth moments in which Suzume navigates her way across Japan by rail and ferry, finding friends and other helpful people along the way. The dragon stands in for the natural disasters that have struck Japan in recent years, but concentrating on one girl’s experiences, good and bad, keeps it from being too general.

2. God bless Wes Anderson. In the face of criticism that his work is too stagey and artificial, he doubles down and just keeps pursuing his own distinctive muse. Asteroid City is a frame within a frame: what at first appears to be a black and white television documentary gives way to staged scenes from the life of a playwright, with the central story—the dramatization of his play—designed and lit with the bright colors of a vintage postcard or schoolbook from the 1950s. The fragmentation of the story across these different layers—superficially about a diverse group stranded in a desert town after a UFO landing, but thematically about grief in all its forms—can be distancing, but Anderson has never been afraid to find the perfect settings for his jewels, whether those consist of close-ups, quietly devastating lines of dialogue, or carefully-composed scenes in their entirety. At this point, anyone lining up for an Anderson film knows what they’re in for. In the same year, he refined his hybrid staging even further with four adaptations of short stories by Roald Dahl for Netflix, with actors reading the narrative and switching to dialogue or action as Dahl’s text dictates, within sets combining moveable flats and real locations. My favorite of these was The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, the longest and most involved of the four and also the first one that was released.

1. It could be said that aspiring teen stuntwoman Ria (Priya Kansara) lives in her own world, and neither setbacks at school nor discouragement from her parents shakes her faith in herself. But when her older sister, art school dropout Lena (Ritu Arya), becomes engaged to a seemingly perfect guy, Ria believes that Lena’s been brainwashed into giving up her dreams and selling out, and she takes it upon herself to stop her. Ria’s campaign against the marriage leads to an escalating series of tactics, from attempts at persuasion to digging up dirt on Lena’s fiancé and planting evidence. She may have crossed the line, but what if she’s right? Polite Society (dir. Nida Manzoor) is a hoot, an energetic martial arts comedy (and, with They Cloned Tyrone, the second movie on this list to namecheck Nancy Drew) and a rousing affirmation of sisterhood set in the distinctive milieu of the Pakistani British community.

0. Oh shit, the hits keep on coming. The other half of the “Barbenheimer” duo, Oppenheimer (dir. Christopher Nolan) is arguably more straightforward than any of Nolan’s recent films, but even so it features multiple timelines and shifts of perspective that threaten to drop the floor from beneath the audience. The race to build the atomic bomb is interlaced with a security hearing a decade after Hiroshima, by which time physicist and project leader J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) had become a scold of the international community, lionized but racked with guilt. The result is a portrait of a complex, conflicted man who was skilled at political operation, but ultimately not as skilled as he imagined.

-1. See what I did there? Godzilla Minus One (dir. Takashi Yamazaki) was my favorite movie of the year, and one of the best films of the entire Godzilla series. The title sets it up as a quasi-prequel, not quite in continuity with the 1954 original but in dialogue with it. As the story begins, Shikishima (Ryunosoke Kamiki), a Kamikaze pilot, lands on an island base for (unneeded) repairs to his aircraft. That night, the local sea monster attacks and Shikishima jumps into his grounded plane but is unable to pull the trigger of his forward guns. He survives but everyone else on the island is killed. Thus Shikishima is haunted by his two failures to act, and when he returns to a defeated, ruined Tokyo, he is shunned as a deserter. Even when he gets a job on a minesweeping boat and enters a tentative relationship with a young single mother (Minami Hamabe), he cannot escape the feeling that he is cursed, haunted by the ghosts of those soldiers he let down. Inevitably, the sea monster he spared returns, bigger, more powerful, and threatening the mainland. Of course, it is Godzilla, but to Shikishima it is destiny itself, come to collect on his earlier lapses of duty, with interest.

In the most harrowing sequence, he watches Godzilla destroy the new buildings in the Ginza district of Tokyo, undoing the progress achieved since the war’s end, and helpless to rescue the one person who has become most precious to him. Godzilla has always had greater resonance for Japanese audiences and creators than he has for Americans, and this film is more politically potent than many installments of the series, but in the moment in which Shikishima watches everything swept away—horrible enough, but made moreso by the knowledge that he could have prevented it—Godzilla Minus One strikes me as a movie about climate change and the numerous disasters that have hammered Japan because of it as much as a statement about war (although of course it is that, too). Godzilla Minus One is an epic, in its own way like Oppenheimer focused on the question, “What can one man do? What does he owe the world, and what himself?” The comparison of the two films, centered on the same time period, the same pivotal moment, reveals differences in both national outlook and artistic temperament. Both films are riveting, grandiose cinematic spectacles and neither presents easy answers.

Thanks for reading! Let me know if I missed any of your favorites from last year, and have a great 2024!

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My 2023 in Books: Highlights

“If Blue were a scholar . . . she would catalogue, across all strands, a comprehensive study of the worlds in which Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy, and in which a comedy. It delights her, whenever visiting a new strand, to take in a performance not knowing how it will end.”

—This Is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

I don’t have a complete reading log to offer this year. I finally, after too long, upgraded to a new computer last summer, leaving behind the document I had started at the beginning of the year. That coincided with a severe reading drought over the summer and I didn’t keep up the log when I finally got back to reading in the fall. So it wasn’t the best year for reading books to begin with, but I do have some highlights worthy of mention.

Science Fiction

Two short science fiction novels made an impression on me. This Is How You Lose the Time War alternates chapters between the perspectives of its two leads, Red and Blue, champions of time- and space-spanning rival powers. The Agency, for whom Red works, represents a post-singularity technological future; the Garden, Blue’s home, is a biologically-engineered paradise. Neither force considers itself safe while the other exists, and the two empires battle across myriad parallel timelines, steering historical events toward their chosen future and cutting off the others’. In this context, Red and Blue are sworn enemies, but they respect each other at a distance like opponents across a chess board. Curious but unable to confront each other face to face, they leave cryptic messages for one another, and their similarities outnumber their differences. (It becomes clear that neither the Agency nor the Garden is the utopia it’s cracked up to be, and one of the prices of the war for Red and Blue is disillusionment.) This is an inventive and lyrical novel, full of poetic flights and extravagant with its language as the clandestine messages back and forth become overt love letters.

Landscape with Invisible Hand by M. T. Anderson is another short but evocative book. Each chapter illuminates a drawing or painting by the narrator, Adam, an aspiring teenage artist. But instead of the infinite worlds of Time War, Landscape focuses on characters with few choices and nowhere to go. In the years since an alien race called the vuvv arrived on Earth and offered membership in their “Interspecies Co-Prosperity Alliance” (red flag!), the gap between the haves and have-nots has grown even larger, and those left behind live in the shadows of the vuvv’s pollution-generating machinery, fighting over jobs in soup kitchens. Adam and his girlfriend Chloe livestream idyllic 1950s-style dates to an audience of fascinated vuvv subscribers, even after they begin to hate each other, an illustration of the way in which the vuvv presence distorts their human “partners,” turning them into caricatures of themselves to satisfy the economic demands of their colonizers. If many science fiction dystopias ask the question “What if white, middle-class people were treated the way minorities and the poor are routinely treated now?”, Landscape with Invisible Hand asks “What if modern, Western society went through the kind of economic and cultural colonization that indigenous people around the world have experienced?”

Another book on a similar theme is The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex (the basis for the animated movie Home), which centers on an invading race called the Boov magnanimously herding all of America’s citizens into a single state reserved just for them (first Florida, but then, after the Boov decide they like Florida, Arizona). Rex is a versatile cartoonist and illustrator as well as a writer, so several sequences are rendered in comics format, purportedly drawn by the Boov main character to explain his world’s history and character. This one is written for a younger audience so it’s fairly whimsical and light, but it’s witty and entertaining and full of asides on human society as seen from an outsider’s perspective in the best science fiction tradition.

Axiom’s End by Lindsay Ellis is a much more grounded novel intended for adults, but it shares with The True Meaning of Smekday a focus on the difficulties of communication with different forms of intelligence and the impossibility of truly knowing another’s mind. Ellis has written that the idea for this novel (the first volume of a trilogy, still underway) sprang from her interest in the Transformers cartoon series, a kernel still present in the friendship between a human woman and an alien being who represents one side in a galactic war. Intriguingly, at least for me, the cohort of aliens who secretly made contact with the U.S. government in the 1970s are identified with Esperanto code names, a relic of the idealism and nerdiness of the group charged with handling them. Linguistic analysis and the ways in which language can channel thought are front and center, but within an action-packed thriller that doesn’t shy away from the gee-whiz tropes popularly associated with science fiction.

Romance

Romance as a genre is, in my opinion, at least partly a form of pulp. Now, before anyone gets defensive, and especially if this is your first time visiting Medleyana and you’re not familiar with my previous writings on pulp, that’s not meant as an insult or a comment on the genre’s readers. But the fact remains that, like the murder mystery, romance is one of the few genres that’s defined by its plot mechanics rather than theme or setting (do not bring a tragic love story without a “happily ever after” to a romance reader and call it a romance). There are established formulas and story beats (especially in the current obsession with tropes and hooks), and, however beautifully written, an emphasis on keeping the story rolling. Many of the romance novelists I explored in the last year were continuing in the tradition of Jane Austen (especially Georgette Heyer, the true parent of “Regency romance” as a publishing genre, and whose work I continued to explore), but there are as many subgenres of romance as there are genres outside it. Paranormal romance in particular overlaps with the fantasy, science fiction and horror that I was already reading.

I particularly enjoyed The Emperor’s New Clothes by Victoria Alexander, set in a small Wyoming town on the cusp of the twentieth century. An itinerant actress, gambler and con woman is mistaken for a visiting English Countess, and with the Countess’ trunks of clothing at her disposal, decides to make the best of it. The only thing confounding her plan to sell her bogus title for cash and move on is the Oxford-educated Mayor, the adopted son of the wealthy rancher who effectively runs things. Will the sparks of attraction between them convince her to go straight, and can he love her for who she is, not who she pretends to be? Well, see my comments on plotting in the paragraph above.

Comics

Although I continued to collect and read comics in the past year, I fell behind and didn’t match the amount I read in 2022. The most notable book I read in this format was Destroyer Duck: Graphite Edition, a trade collection of a series from the early 1980s. Destroyer Duck was an unusual collaboration between writer Steve Gerber, then fighting with Marvel over ownership of his creation Howard the Duck, and artist Jack Kirby, who had his own reasons to feel mistreated by Marvel. As such, the adventures of Duke “Destroyer” Duck, a macho, capable John Rambo among talking waterfowl, are marked by relentless action that would have been out of character for Howard’s acerbic social commentary and self-examination (read: navel-gazing). Of course, this is Gerber, so there are still plenty of axes to grind as Destroyer avenges his unnamed friend, “the little guy,” who was taken in, exploited, and abandoned by the sprawling Godcorp, an obvious stand-in for Marvel with characters based on editors or fellow artists whom Gerber felt mistreated him or picked the wrong side. (If that’s what Gerber thought of Marvel then, I can only imagine what he would make of its current Disney-owned incarnation and the dominance of the MCU.) The first issue of Destroyer Duck was published by independent Eclipse Comics as a fund-raiser for Gerber’s legal bills and continued as an ongoing series; the Graphite Edition collects the first five issues, the sum of Gerber’s and Kirby’s collaboration. (In the vein of currently popular “artist’s editions,” this book is a reproduction of Kirby’s original pencil art rather than a full reprint of the finished color comics, but knowing that readers like me might be encountering this material for the first time, they’ve kindly included word balloons with dialogue, which were usually added during the inking process.) A wealth of commentary and supplementary material rounds out the volume.

I read other stuff during the year as well, but I’ve run long enough and it’s already the second week of January. I have more year-end articles to get to, not to mention Ninjanuary and Vintage Science Fiction Month! Perhaps I’ll get to those before July. In the meantime, thanks for reading!

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