I haven’t really watched movies in 2018, not good ones-- things got kinda all messed up in that last half of 2018, but I should try to make a year-end list anyways since that’s a thing I think is a good exercise.  But I missed all the big adult movies-- Cold War, Beale Street,  You Were Never Really Here, First Reformed, Sister Brothers, Eighth Grade, Zama, the Favourite or Roma-- boy, I have a lot to catch up on.  I might end up having a really great January, I guess.   Except that Star is Born-- I’m pretty good not having seen that.  No thanks, there.

(The last really great movie I saw was I finally watched Personal Shopper which I thought was terrific, I really like Assayas a lot, but that’s a 2017 movie.  Or the first great movie I saw last year was Phantom Thread, but again technically a 2017 movie).    

Anyways, here’s what I end up with, with the dregs that are left (though Tumblr is saying one of the movie I saw in 2018 posts is porno according to their advanced filter technology, and I can’t see what it is, so my memory is imperfect)(my favorite movie of 2018 was SSNI-355 Student Nurses Are Gang Banged Together ~ We Were Fucked By Perverted Doctors At A BBQ Party, and I don’t know why Tumblr would have a problem with me saying that):

10.  Mission Impossible: Fallout-- After the “oh wow” of it all wears off, I think I like these movies for the reason people who sniff about them hate them-- they don’t have a screenplay that got worked on all that much. They just had 30 pages of a treatment, and then it was time to film so they could hit their relase date-- and it doesn’t really fucking matter because they hired the right people and they were making the right kinda movie for that.  The stuff of this kind of entertainment isn’t that complicated and it’s not necessarily helped by overthinking it.  There’s a girl who the hero wants to be with but can’t be with-- there’s a bad guy, and the bad guy’s cooler henchman-- there’s a femme fatale and masks and chases and double-crosses within doublecrosses.  The things that really matter for these movies-- cool, velocity, glamour, impact-- are so direct and simple and to my mind, wonderful, wonderfully reptile-brain.  “What if they hired some poindexter to spray false profundity all over it” is just not an interesting question to ask about them to me-- they've done that-- it was called the Dark Knight-- I don’t give a shit about that movie, by comparison.  I’d rather watch this. It’s more fun.  It feels more honest.   

9.  The Night is Short, Walk on Girl-- one of the worst character types in anime (scummy sexless guy who we’re supposed to root for, despite his personality) slightly sours this otherwise effervescent ode to drinking and carousing and the nighttime.  Visually woozy, and just... I’ve had good times at night, back when I had good times, so I like that they made a cartoon where that’s the premise, that certain kinds of things can only happen at night.  It’s a magical realist take on the One Crazy Night genre which is a genre I’m fond of.  The best one, Scorsese’s After Hours, it’s all happening cause the guy wants to get laid and not be stuck in his daily grind, and then things go wrong.  It’s simple and clean.  This one has some of that quality to it, that simplicity, at least in the opening stretch which is the most winning... 

8.   The Zen Diaries Of Garry Shandling-- I liked Garry Shandling back when and had a lot of admiration for his TV work, so I enjoyed this documentary about him.  It probably smoothed over a lot of rough edges, but the affection to it was nice, understandable.  But more, it was just that ... just hearing a guy who wanted to push himself a certain way’s always interesting.  I’m probably not one of those guys!  It’s probably a relief not to be one of those guys.  But it’s just interesting, hearing someone articulate all that and push for a personal vision of how he had to do what he did, at least for me.

7. Isle of Dogs-- the internet discussion around this movie was a bummer, but I just thought it was a really cool visit into Wes Anderson World.  The drums; the scene between Chief and the girl dog; there’s a Youtube video about the amount of work that went into stop-motion sushi that’s pretty jaw-dropping.  Sure, it’s always a wallow in style, but Anderson’s always got a heart-on-his-sleeve sadness shot through his stuff that I look forward to just as much.  He’s never just putting Futura font up there alone-- there’s always a melancholy that I think people are overly dismissive of.  

6. Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse-- weeks later, my very high opinion of this really hasn’t diminished much.  It’s just... It’s a creation of pop culture (a spiderman animated film-- which just has “Business Decision!” written all over it), using pop culture as part of its bones, as part of its toolset to make a larger case for the importance of pop culture and for an expansive and inclusive vision of what that culture can mean.  It’s about an artist who sees a void when he tries to imagine himself in his world, finding a place for himself in a larger pop culture “universe” by daring to imagine that there could be “alternate worlds” than the one he’s stuck in.  And it’s a stinging rebuke to the worst kinds of narrow fans who insist on a closed-off vision of what pop culture means and has to mean for its audience, at a time when that debate is very now.  While it may not be narratively especially interesting, it’s just so thematically generous besides being visually just such a delight, and comedically a surprisingly entertaining piece.  Spiderman is a crappy character, but I think that movie is really fucking a neat piece of work.

5.  The Other Side of the Wind-- It’s kind of astonishing this movie exists in a watchable state.  But also: it’s kind of good?  Or interesting at least.  There’s some stuff in it that’s just pointlessly mean and petty-- one character’s just about Welles trying to shit on Pauline Kael.  But it’s got a sort of exhausted quality that I find really... I just found it interesting-- everything hip goes stale eventually, and seeing someone who’d gone stale but was still Orson Welles, try to process that angrily-- I’m not sure how else a movie like that could work, which wouldn’t be as distracted by the moment.   It works here because so much time has passed, that you can read it in a way that maybe is more how it was meant to be read, perversely.  I don’t know.  It’s too weird not to rank.  The Other Side of the Wind!!!

4.   Paddington 2-- it’s just good!  I don’t know-- Hugh Grant fucking kills; Brendan Gleeson’s great; Sally Hawkins!  The first one’s o-kay, but the second one has scenes where they use the computer graphics to dazzle in more childlike ways that feels so much more fun to me than other CGI spectacle movies.  The pop-up book sequence, in particular, I just thought was really something to watch.  I saw some of it on an airplane and it stood out on a little airplane screen... 

3.  Death of Stalin-- just a mean, nasty, heartless movie, for the mean, nasty, heartless times we get to be alive for. The movie’s about a historically interesting period, but besides that, look, read the papers-- we’re a bad people, worse everyday, so seeing a movie about where that leads, what becomes of that, I don’t know, I thought that was pretty fun.  Fuck hopepunk.   

2.  The Ballad of Buster Scruggs-- It’s not my favorite Coens, but it’s just got a bunch of what makes Coens stuff work in it.  Done as simply as it is, you really get a clearer look at what makes their stuff work than usual.  Especially because they just tell you flat-out in the last one-- “You know the story, but people can't get enough of them, like little children. Because, well, they connect the stories to themselves, I suppose, and we all love hearing about ourselves, so long as the people in the stories are us, but not us. Not us in the end, especially.”  They present fools scampering around hiding from death, chasing foolish dreams, hiding from the bleakness of the world, and then death finds them, that bleakness finds them, a darkness awaits.  And that’s their movies-- comedies and dramas. If there’s some songs, it’s a pretty good time.  They’re my favorite directors going.  

1.  Support the Girls-- when I think about it, this movie about a breastaurant manager having a bad day is probably the best movie I saw this year, in terms of just... It was just the warmest movie towards people generally.  Or well, not people-- women specifically.  It’s a love-letter by Andrew Bujalski to working class black women (such a weird thing to write out!!) and just... Without being sugary hope-hope-rah-rah bullshit-- it didn’t end up on on some shitty Vox list of “things that make tumblr morons want to hug themselves” with Discworld and Harry Potter and Brooklyn 99.  It’s admiring without sliding into glorifying, or over-sentimentalizing, or faking the underlying exhaustion of it all, how exhausting it all is.  Regina Hall gives probably the most likable performance this year, though the Oscars seem almost certain to ignore it.  It’s about characters keeping their dignity in an undignified world, in a system that's designed to rob them of that dignity as the basis of its commerce.  And it just has the best ending-- one that the experience of seeing and feeling really kinda would beat me trying to describe it in words, the way you want from a movie (provided you feel what it’s trying to get you to feel, which perhaps is a big if).  I think it’s a smarter movie than it lets on, but it doesn’t really matter as much as how much more empathetic a movie it is than anything else I can imagine being out there this year...

Worst Movie: look, I saw Sicario 2, but I knew what I was getting myself in for there. I hated Sicario 1, and I think everyone involved in those movies is fucking braindead.  So I can’t pretend I was like “Oh no Sicario 2 how could you” because I knew.  I knew.  So for me, even though Sicario 2 is academically worse, mathematically the worst movie, I’m still going with Duncan Jones’s Mute, starring Paul Rudd and I don’t know who else, assholes, all assholes.  Just the most unbearable shit-- hand-me-down visuals from Blade Runner, trying to bring life to some dopey rudderless story about toxic masculinity, but utterly failing to do so.  Just a slog.  A very unpleasant memory. It’s delusion that it was “saying something” about men and patriarchal violence, was almost as noxiously stupid as imagining it had anything interesting to say about the future or technology or just anything, anything at all.  Just bad.  Just a bad, unentertaining movie.