Firstly, I’ll admit that this particular blog entry is a rip-off of homage to Matt Singer of Screencrush’s own “40 Years, 40 Movies” column. In that, to celebrate turning 40, Singer highlighted one movie from each of his 40 years and what it meant to him personally.
Since I turned 40 on January 18, 2021, I figured I would do basically the same thing. There are a few fundamental differences though. Most obviously is that he works as a film critic, so some of those movies have an effect on his career trajectory, whereas I’m just some goober with a WordPress blog.
Another difference is that he gets to include a movie from all 40 of his years, since he has a late in the year birthday. I only actually have 39 movies as I type this because basically nothing has released in 2021 yet and I haven’t seen what scant offerings there are.
Also, these movies aren’t necessarily the best movies of their respective years, nor are they always my favorite movies of those years. Indeed some of them are downright terrible. These are just movies that have had some influences or associations with me. I haven’t necessarily watched them in the year of release, and I’ve been lazy and used Wikipedia as my source for all the release years. With that preamble out of the way let’s begin with:
1981 – For Your Eyes Only
I had to include a James Bond film. Like many a Brit, bank holiday Mondays meant a day off school/work, sitting at home and watching an edited-for-TV version of a film. More often than not, that was an adventure of secret agent 007. Much of my pre-teen bonding with my father would be sitting and watching Bond while he drank a whiskey and I drank a ginger ale.
Why this particular Bond movie though? Partially because of how the years worked out. Mostly though, and here’s the dirty little secret, when I picture James Bond, I don’t think of Sean Connery, Daniel Craig, or even Pierce Brosnan. When I think of James Bond in my head, he looks like Roger Moore. And this is probably Moore’s best Bond movie (The Spy Who Loved Me is the only other contender). It’s not exactly gritty but it is a curse correction after the over the top goofiness of Moonraker, the previous installment.
1982 – Blade Runner
My second movie, and I’m already technically cheating, because the version of Blade Runner I think of is the so-called “Director’s Cut” without the voiceover and tacked on happy ending and that was only really widely available after 1992.
This is one of two movies that I associate with going to college. And it’s entirely because a store near my dorm was doing a “buy one get one free” offer on DVDs, and I’d just got my first computer with a DVD drive, and therefore my first DVD player. So when I wasn’t doing coursework or drinking (this being the UK, where 18 was both the legal drinking age and college freshman age) I’d have Ridley Scott’s rain-drenched vaguely dystopian Los Angeles as the background vision in the first place where I lived without either of my parents. Well that or Hugh Grant flop-sweating in front of Julia Roberts in a curiously all-white version of Notting Hill. I think it’s unsurprising that as an unabashed fan of science fiction (as the rest of this list will show) that it was the Harrison Ford starring neo-noir that left the lasting impression.
1983 – Return Of The Jedi
If you’re a geek of my vintage, you’ve seen all the Star Wars films. It’s practically law. Like just about everyone else, I can’t remember a time in my life before I’d seen a Star Wars movie, and this is the first one released theatrically during my life time, so it gets the spot to honour the franchise. Jedi might be the weakest of the original trilogy, but the redemption scenes of Vader, Luke, and Sheev Palpatine in the throne room of the second Death Star showing the redemptive part of the hero’s journey structure still manages to shine through the fighting teddy bears of Endor, and the fact that Harrison Ford has so obviously checked out on playing Han Solo.
1984 – The Karate Kid
Another disadvantage that I have compared to Matt Singer’s original version of this article is, as my wife never tires of pointing out, I haven’t seen many movies! Which sometimes means that certain movies win their year by default.
That’s kind of the case here, but in this case, the movie is iconic enough that I’ve seen it plenty of times (though never any of the sequels, oddly) and it still some cultural cachet even in 2021.
At Karate Kid‘s core, it’s an anti-bullying story that says that most problems can be solved by a combination of menial housework, menial yardwork, and sweet highly telegraphed, kicks to the face, and I think we can agree that’s a message that resonates for the ages.
1985 – Back To The Future
Another 1980s movie that I would describe as utterly iconic. I think it’s fair to say that DeLoreans are better known as time machines than they are as cars at this point. I love time travel movies, and they’ll pop up as later movies on this very blog entry. But what I really love about this movie is its score. The main theme might still be the best piece of music Alan Silvestri ever composed.
Plus, this is a movie that wired late Generation X/Early Millennials into nostalgia culture for good or ill, and the veritable torrent of reboots, remakes, and sequels we’ve otten from that age group ever since just underscores that.
1986 – Labyrinth
My single favorite musician of all time, hamming it up as the villain? I’m immediately sold. But this movie has things beyond just David Bowie as Jareth The Goblin King (not that it needs it), with absolute top notch work from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop.
There’s also the frustration and wish fulfillment aspect of wanting to be rid of a young interloper in your household (my little sister would have been two when this movie came out, but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence) and realizing the reality of that set against the fantasy backdrop. Also “It’s not fair. But that’s the way it is,” remains an effective life lesson.
1987 – Masters of the Universe
As I said before, these aren’t necessarily the best movies, my favorite movies, or even good movies from their year. This one gets the nod for 1987 for an incredibly simple reason – this was the first movie I remember ever seeing in the theater.
A no-budget adaptation of an even lower-budgeted cartoon starring Courtney Cox and Robert Duncan McNeill (or as I think of him here Baby Tom Paris) as boring humans interacting with actors playing lamer versions of the toys I already had was probably not the most auspicious start to the cinematic experience, but the combination of me being a pudding-brained six-year-old, and Frank Langella having an absolute blast playing Skeletor at least kept it fun.
1988 – Who Framed Roger Rabbit
It always strikes me as odd that the title doesn’t have a question mark…
Simple reason for including this one. I like special effects movies, I like animation, and this movie does a great job of blending the live action and animated characters together pretty seamlessly. Which is impressive enough when you consider everything was either hand drawn or a practical effect.
This film also has its memorable nightmare moments for younger kids. I’m pretty sure the shoe getting dipped, and the reveal of Judge Doom’s true nature are seared into a lot of folks’ memories.
1989 – Batman
In the post-MCU world of 2021, it’s impossible to state just how big the impact of marketing hype for this movie was. If Jaws and Star Wars are credited with really inventing the blockbuster movie as we know it, Batman was the first hypebuster. Its marketing campaign was omnipresent in a way few movies before it could even dream of. It’s also the first movie I can recall that was marketed almost entirely as a logo. I don’t think there was a flat surface anywhere that didn’t have a black background and gold bat symbol on it at some point. What’s odd is that the symbol in the marketing didn’t match the symbol on Michael Keaton’s Batsuit.
I remember being able to see this movie in theaters because I absolutely had to, so that was a triumph of marketing. What’s odd was that this movie introduced the “12” rating in the UK which meant that you had to be 12 or older to see it, but I would have bene 8 and got in, so I guess enforcement was more lax backthen.
1990 – Goodfellas
Now, I know I wasn’t watching this as a nine-year-old, so it must have been one I came to later, probably as a miserable teen. It remains my favorite Scorsese movie, and quite possibly my favorite gangster movie.
Mostly because it’s so tightly directed and well made, I’m probably the billionth person to praise that kitchen tracking shot, but there’s a reason it gets called out so consistently. The language if this movie is also almost poetic in its profanity as well, wielding every curse like a scalpel. Its also the movie where you see Joe Pesci, who I mostly knew as one of Home Alone‘s wet bandits show just how good he is at playing utter psychopaths.
1991 – Terminator 2 – Judgment Day
I mentioned before how I deeply enjoy science fiction movies, action movies, and movies with time travel plots. This has all of that, and is the rare example of a sequel being better than the original. It’s still the high water mark of the entire Terminator franchise, even if the trailers did spoil the first big twist of the movie – that the T-800 was in fact the good guy this time.
This movie is peak Cameron, and peak Schwarzenegger. The morphing CGI does look a little bit dated, but the action scenes and various chases still look really bloody good.
1992 – A Few Good Men
Everybody has that one film that if they catch a second of it while channel surfing on the cable box, they’re all in to the very end. A Few Good Men is that movie for me. I’d love to have a rational explanation but I’m not sure there is one.
I know nothing of the UCMJ and the legal underpinnings of the movie might well be utter and complete nonsense, but I’m not sure that matters because Sorkin’s script is just that well constructed. The cast is pretty uniformly excellent. Even if both Cruise and Nicholson are just playing their usual movie star personas more than the actual roles they have.
1993 – Jurassic Park
There are some things that are basically unavoidable in pop culture if you’re my age, as mentioned way up there in 1983’s entry, one of them is Star Wars. The other is Steven Spielberg. I’d wager the he was the first director a lot of people my age could name. He held something of a unique place in that I think even people who didn’t care about who made films behind the camera could name Spielberg as a director, and that his name was generally a byword for a quality movie, 1941 aside. It’s less the case now, but in the 1980s and 1990s he might have been the most reliable name in Hollywood.
1993 was probably peak Spielberg with the release of both the critically acclaimed Schindler’s List, and the commercial juggernaut that was Jurassic Park. I went with the latter because I have very boring mainstream tastes and because Jurassic Park evokes the sense of wonder that I always associate with the Spielberg movies of my youth. When you first see the dinos and that John Williams theme ramps up…
1994 – Interview With The Vampire
A movie I watched so much that I literally wore out the VHS tape. I’m not a big fan of Anne Rice, but this adaptation of her first Vampire Chronicles novel manages to capture the feel of the book so well. The absolutely sumptuous art direction and set design standing in for absolutely acres of purple prose. The cast being a murderers row of 1990s Hollywood pretty boys, with even the minor part of the interviewer being Christian Slater. Never mind that Tom Cruise looks absolutely nothing like book Lestat, he effortlessly captures the somewhat creepy charisma and darkness.
And Brad Pitt’s magnificent, tortured Louis is exactly what I imagined reading the book. The movie also gets into the sheer eroticism present within the vampire myth, which was always subtext in the older stories, is very much the text in Rice’s work, and pervades just about every single frame of this film.
1995 – Get Shorty
For the longest time, this was my go to answer for the “what’s your favorite film” question. I’m not entirely sure why. I think a lot of it is that it retains Elmore Leonard’s dialog from the novel it’s based on, and Leonard writes absolutely crackerjack dialog.
It might also be a triumph of timing. It caught John Travolta after his Pulp Fiction comeback had made him respectable again and before the twin whammies of Face/Off and Battlefield Earth had returned him to the realm of self-parody. Maybe it’s the meta nature admitting that making movies really isn’t that far from organized crime, just with better accountants.
It’s a film that remains endlessly rewatchable.
1996 – Different For Girls
Now, this one is a shamelessly obscure movie. It’s a British/French co-production that made roughly $300,000 at the box office.
This is one of the first movies I recall that was framed around a trans narrative and portrayed it in a positive light. I’m sure it doesn’t hold up great now, what with having the main trans woman character played by a cis male actor, but 1996 really was a different, less aware time for LGBTQ issues in general. I remember it being fairly sympathetic.
But the real reason I’m picking this movie here is for the soundtrack, which has a lot of great punk songs on it. The big three it introduced me to were “Another Girl, Another Planet” by The Only Ones, “Whole Wide World” by Wreckless Eric, and “Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve)” by The Buzzcocks. All 3 of which still pretty regularly pop up on my “pump yourself up” playlists, despite the relatively melancholy lyrics.
1997 – The End of Evangelion
This one is another sort of cheat, in that I’m crowbarring it on to the list to talk about the Neon Genesis Evangelion franchise as a whole. This franchise was my first real exposure to anime, and it really isn’t a good introduction to a medium, since it’s very concerned with the deconstruction of the tropes associated with that medium, or at least the robot genre within that medium. I think it’s a great series, though it is undeniably nihilistic, and perhaps no more so than in this movie spin-off/alternative ending.
I think this franchise might by the ur-text of a lot of my interests. I’m an enormous fan of giant robots (There are several Gundam model kits in eyesight from where I’m typing this, and I’m going to build an EVA-01 kit for my office desk once we’re allowed to return to actual offices, I’ve seen/read just about every Transformers episode, movie, and comic since 1984, and I’m assembling Steampunk-esque mecha for the Warmachine tabletop game), religious imagery/allegory in my science fiction (big reasons for enjoying the book Dune, and the Babylon 5 tv series) and Evangelion has that by the bucket load. If they had somehow managed to work in a King Arthur angle, I’d be almost certain that it was made secifically for me.
1998 – Lock, Stock, And Two Smoking Barrels
Another crime caper film, and one with Guy Ritchie’s London wideboy sensibilities shot all the way through it. It’s arguably a low-stakes, extremely British take on the Tarantino action movie, with a lot of profane and funny dialog mixed in with the violence. Less bare feet shots here than with Tarantino though.
This is another movie I watched a bunch because I appreciated how the plot just keeps on adding more and more complications without ever quite breaking under it’s own weight. It’s also the only good film that Sting has ever appeared in.
1999 – Fight Club
Yeah, it’s the movie every try-hard edgelord teenager was into around the turn of the millennium, and I’mnot exempt from that. It’s also a really good movie that tries to address the issues with toxic masculinity in the third act. I don’t think it succeeds at that goal, but I appreciate the attempt.
I’ve always thought of Fight Club as a pitch-lack comedy, and don’t think much of it was ever to be taken seriously. It’s practically drowning in it’s own cynicism. The other thing I’ll say is that watching it more or less back-to-back with The Usual Suspects inspired my love of meta-narrative and identity twists in fiction.
2000 – X-Men
Superhero movies have definitely become the dominant genre now, but a couple of decades ago, that wasn’t the case. It had been a good long while since a superhero movie had been a critical and commercial success when X-Men came along. Arguably, the last movie to fulfil that criteria was Batman Returns a full eight years prior.
I’ve always been a fan of comic books, but typically more of DC than Marvel. That said the side of Marvel I did read was the merry mutants. This is because most of the first volume of Uncanny X-Men got released as a DVD compilation around this time. Being a completionist, I started reading with issue 1 and the Silver Age stylings of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. I think it’s fair to say that in comics, the X-Men didn’t become the X-Men until Chris Claremont arrived in the mid-70s. The X-Men films naturally concentrate on this era, because that’s when the most popular members joined the team (though Scott “Cyclops” Summers and Jean “Jean Grey” Grey were there from the very beginning) including a certain surly be-clawed Canadian.
This is one of the movies that won it’s year by default for me, but it still works well, and Sirs Patrick and Ian are great as Professor X and Magneto.
2001 – The Lord of The Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
And speaking of a perfectly cast Sir Ian McKellen, here he is again, this time as Gandalf the Grey.
Lord of the Rings is in many ways the fantasy book. It’s only a trilogy because of post-war paper shortages and Tolkien famously viewed it as one book. A book that has a significant amount of pop cultural heft,and hadn’t been adapted to film beyond a split Ralph Bakshi/Rankin-Bass animated duology.
The task of turning that into a movie had to be onerous, but to my mind Peter Jackson and company absolutely nailed it at the first time of asking. This remains my favorite of the trilogy, and it definitely is how I visualize Middle Earth when I read the books.
2002 – Signs
Not the best movie, probably not the best M Night Shyamalan movie, and Mel Gibson brings a raft of issues as well, but this is the single film I most associate with moving from the UK to the USA. This is mostly a quirk of timing. One of my first dates with the woman I moved to America for was seeing Signs in the theater. And when my UK family did a surprise “goodbye/sendoff” party, one of the movies rented was also Signs.
2003 – Old School
An extremely dumb Will Ferrell comedy. This is on here because I find it funny, more than anything else. It’s more of a bunch of sketches loosely strung together by a plot than it is a coherent film,but that’s a strength for background watching.
The reason it’s here is that this is a movie that I saw in theaters when the only people in the theater wre the group I was with, so maybe six or seven people. Normally that’s not great for a comedy, but something about the atmosphere that day led to just uproarious laughter at almost every joke. I remember the tranquillizer dart sequence in particular as absolutely slaying us.
2004 – Shaun of the Dead
Looking at the rest of this list, you’ll see that I’m not really a big horror movie guy. That doesn’t mean I’m unfamiliar with the general tropes of horror movies simply from the process of pop cultural osmosis.
That’s probably why I appreciate this zombie movie spoof on a meta level, since it’s done with such obvious affection for the genre, plus the Edgar Wright/Simon Pegg/Nick Frost trio are exerts in the language of film, something that they showed at least as far back as their UK sitcom Spaced, which was another one of those things I watched constantly on DVD throughout my University years. I will say that I slightly prefer Hot Fuzz when it comes to the Cornetto trilogy but the years didn’tquite work.
2005 – Kingdom of Heaven
The second Ridley Scott directed movie on this list, and the second one where the theatrical version is basically garbage compared to the director’s cut. If you’ve seen the theatrical version of this movie, then you haven’t actually seen the movie in my opinion.
We have religious themes and knights, since we’re dealing with the Crusades here. Specifically, the Second Crusade and (in the epilogue) the Third. The film’s narrative is a good story, but not remotely historical, so don’t go in assuming it’s based on anything like a true story. It just borrows the names of some historical folks for the characters. I occasionally watch this or the theatrical cut when I reach a writer’s block moment in editing, because the different cuts show the power of what can be salvaged (or savaged) in the editing process.
2006 – Cars
Possibly the least respected of all the Pixar franchises, the reason this automotive remake of Doc Hollywood makes my list is simple. It was my son’s favorite movie when he was between two and six years old, as any parent will tell you, that means you’ll have seen that movie possibly hundreds of times.
I don’t think it’s as bad as it’s reputation, and the voice cast is mostly pretty good, especially Paul Newman as Doc Hudson.
2007 – No Country For Old Men
I enjoy pretty much all of the Coen brothers movies that I’ve seen, and this was the first one I recall seeing theatrically. It has a real sense of menace about the antagonist, Anton Chigurh that’s enhanced by the movie having effectively no score. You don’t notice the lack of musical cues the first time you watch (or at least my half-deaf self didn’t) but something feels off providing an undercurrent of uneasiness that can’tquite be placed.
It’s also one of the best recent Westerns I’ve seen, even if it’s set approximately a century after most of the frontier was tamed.
2008 – Iron Man
Like an awful lot of people based on the box office numbers, my film viewing for the past decade-plus has been dominated by the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a ludicrously ambitious crossover project with a ton of interlocking movies and now TV shows.
It all started here with a relatively unassuming picture about a comic book character who was, at best B-list. I knew barely anything about the character of Iron Man going into this one. It just happened to be a slow weekend and I wanted to see a movie with some action in it. The powers that be at Marvel Studios managed to get the perfect casting for the character with Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark, and the rest is pretty much movie history. This won’t be the last time a Marvel movie pops up on this list, for sure.
2009 – Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Another absolutely mammoth movie franchise, and one that doesn’t get or deserve anywhere near the levels of critical respect the Marvel movies do. This entry, the second of the live action Transformers movies came out during the writer’s strike,and so didn’t even have a script, making it even less coherent than the “shards of random metal parts” robot designs common to the Michael Bay movies.
I mentioned earlier that I’ve been a die-hard fan of the Transformers overall meta-franchise since the mid-1980s, and while it’s definitely had its shares of highs and lows, this one s firmly a low. So, why is it here as my choice for 2009? Embarrassingly enough, because this is the movie I’ve seen more times in the theater than any other. This wasn’t intentional, it’s just that different groups I was hanging around with wanted to see it on the big screen, because this type of special effects heavy blockbuster belongs there. So I’ve seen the movie where John Turturro says “I am standing directly beneath the enemy’s scrotum” no less than five times in the cinema.
2010 – RED
This is another one of those years where the entry basically wins by default. This particular movie wins for having some just incongruously great action scenes and lunacy. From Helen Mirren with a machine gun, to John Malkovich as an LSD-addled conspiracy nutcase who’s right about absolutely everything.
Watching the movie, it honestly looks like the cast was having so much fun making it that it becomes infectious. It might also represent the last time Bruce Willis pretended togive a crap about anything in an acting performance.
2011 – Thor
I said we’d be coming back to the Marvel movies, didn’t I? This is another default pick (I was having a tough time of things in the early 2010s for reasons I won’t go in to), but is less arbitrary than most. I’ve always enjoyed Norse mythology, and while Marvel’s version of it is very much its own take with many of the relationships changed to better generate conflict between the characters or the wider Marvel universe, it still has roots in the Asgardian mythos.
And Jack Kirby’s version of the Asgard aesthetic is all over this movie, tot he point that it’s almost disappointing that Thor spends so much of the runtime on Midgard.
2012 – The Cabin In The Woods
The second horror movie to appear on this list, and the second one to be really all about the comedic interaction of meta narrative of horror tropes and their interactions. Apparently, when I do like horror, I have a hyper-specific taste for the type I care for.
I also like exactly how downbeat the ending of this movie is. It absolutely commits to the only way its mythos could end and goes all the way there. That’s something no amount of eye-rolling slightly bored scientist observers could prepare you for.
2013 – I Know That Voice
As I’ve mentioned a few times here, I’m a fan of animation, and I find the craft of voice acting to be pretty amazing. As someone who can barely do my own voce, I’m in awe of people like Frank Welker, Billy West, Cree Summer, or Tara Strong who can do literally hundreds of them.
This documentary, narrated by John DiMaggio (no slouch himself) is an absolutely fascinating look into the world of voice acting and how it’s different from on camera acting, and why specialty voice actors are still going strong despite the common practice of casting celebrity voices in big name animation movies.
2014 – Birdman, or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
2014 was the year I met my now-wife, and she is a very big movie/film person. To that end, this was the year where I tried to make sure I had seen all of the Best Picture Oscar nominees before the ceremony. It gave us something to talk about during our online chats as we negotiated the long distance part of our relationship.
I went with Birdman out of the nominees for this year over Whiplash by a hair’s breadth. I think that’s mostly because I was impressed by just how well edited Birdman was to appear like a single take, as well as an absolutely stellar central performance by Michael Keaton as the titular character’s washed-up alter ego.
2015 – Mad Max: Fury Road
George Miller made the best action movie in a long time by stripping everything down to its bare essentials. The characters are archetypes, something that’s also true of the original Mad Max trilogy, and the entire movie is essentially a two-hour chase scene, but that’s all it eeds to be to keep the adrenalin pounding from beginning to end.
Also of note is that so many of the effects are practical, even if they are sweetened with CGI. So the reason the Doof Warrior’s guitar flamethrower looks so damned good is because it’s an actual real guitar with flame thrower built in. That’s utterly, gloriously insane!
2016 – Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
Only he second time a Star Wars movie makes this list, and it’s not even one of the Skywalker Saga episodes. In our current era of reboots, remakes, relaunches and sequels, I feel like I have to at least mention the Disney-era Star Wars movies.
The smartest thing they did was to try and expand the IP beyond being the story of two families, since the Galaxy Far, Far Away is one heck of a sand box to play in, but the prequel trilogy had shrunk the universe by making everything so tightly interconnected to the original trilogy. The smart move was to do side stories, and of the two currently extant side story movies, Rogue One is the best one. It’s aping the structure of a war movie in the same way that A New Hope aped the structure of The Hidden Fortress. It’s possibly still too tightly bound to the original movies (I don’t think we needed a Dr Evazan cameo, for example) but the main characters aren’t.
I did mildly lie to describe this movie when I described it as a Star Wars movie that doesn’t feature a single lightsaber. Since there’s one scene that features one rather prominently towards the end.
2017 – Paddington 2
A ridiculously wholesome film, and one where Hugh Grant is enjoying himself playing the villain of the piece so much. While it is a sequel, I don’t think you need to see the first film to appreciate this one.
It’s very much a low key and relaxing kids film, there’s the tiniest bit of political subtext with how Mr. Curry patrols the Windsor Gardens, but even that’s a stretch.
2018 – Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse
The animated superhero movie that feels the most like reading a superhero comic. This movie is remarkable in how clever it is in blending the different art styles of the different characters into its own synthesis. The simple thing of Miles frame rate going up as he gets better at his powers resulting in more fluid movements is a wonderful trick and only possible in the animated medium.
There’s also enough variations on the classical Spider-Man formula that the plot isn’t as predictable as you think. I was particular impressed by the initial Doc Ock reveal for example.
2019 – Avengers: Endgame
Quite literally the biggest movie in the world. You’ve almost certainly seen it. There’s not much to say here, but this feels like the last time that a movie was a cultural event. Some of that is because 2020 and coronavirus put a dampener on literally anything being a cultural touchstone, as we had to become more anti-social as a survival technique.
I think even without that Avengers: Endgame might still be the last hurrah of a true monoculture moment, at least in the USA. It’s the last time I can recall where literally everyone I know just had to see it as soon as possible both to avoid spoilers, and to talk about and dissect it later. Even the final Skywalker Saga Star Wars movie didn’t have that energy to it.
2020 – Onward
Given the whole “global pandemic” thing, 2020 was a very strange year for movies. I didn’t visit a movie theater even once, which meant my movie choices were reduced to those available on streaming.
Considering that the big activity that kept me sane and in contact with friends was playing Dungeons & Dragons online, I think the most appropriate choice of movies was the one that felt the most lie watching somebody’s D&D campaign, and since Vin Diesel didn’t release a Riddick movie, which I’m pretty sure is just his D&D campaign at this point, that honor goes to Pixar’s first movie of 2020.
Something about the sensibility of magical creatures surviving and mutating into our current mundane age feels more like something I’d play, and the goofiness of all the voice performers certainly doesn’t lessen that impression.
2021 – You Ain’t Seen N-Nothin’ Yet
You ain’t been around!
Okay, so that’s 40 years and (not quite) 40 movies that have had an impact in most of those years. What are your thoughts on this? Feel free to drop a comment and let me know what you think.
Thoughts of a Lost Limey 