Three critics from Vulture (Bilge Ebiri, Alison Willmore and Anjelica Jade Bastien) had a discussion about how bad the quality of the waning movie year has been. SPOILER ALERT: It was horrendous.
These three critics seem to believe that we need to lower expectations a bit (“Do we want too much from this medium that we love?”) They list “RRR,” “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Everything Everywhere All At Once” as “highlights” of the year.
As Willmore says, we’re all still waiting for that feeling of being utterly obliterated by something we saw onscreen. Bastien “ache(s) with worry about the future of the medium.” Ebiri admits that “An Ingmar Bergman doesn’t happen in the age of streaming.”
Yikes. How morose. But they’re right. If 2019 showed great hope for the future of the medium, COVID entered in 2020 and said “hold my beer.” Ever since then it’s been a brutal time for anyone who cherishes movies as much as we do.
Going through the potential contenders for my ten best list (which will be published next week), I wondered: “that’s it?” Don’t get me wrong, I could easily, in the blink of an eye, make a top 20 this year, but what I realized lacked most was sheer greatness.
I knew this was going to be a bad year when I attended Cannes in May, a Mecca for the best of world cinema, and left feeling rather underwhelmed by a lot of the stuff that I saw there. It set the tone for the rest of the year because if Cannes, a festival almost every elite filmmaker would want their film to premiere at, could come up with such a lukewarm lineup, then we’re probably screwed for the rest of the year.
On paper, 2022 was supposed to be a great year but then there turned out to be one auteur-driven disappointment after another: Aronofsky’s “The Whale,” Baumbach’s “White Noise,” Inarritu’s “Bardo,” David O. Russell’s “Amsterdam,” Claire Denis’ “The Stars at Noon,” and many more.
This all led to total and utter bombast being celebrated by critics for their old-school charms (“Top Gun: Maverick,” “RRR,” “Elvis,” “Avatar: The Way of Water,” “Glass Onion,” “The Woman King”) — maximalism is cool again. There’s no time for subtlety, it’s now go big or go home. “Everything Everywhere All At Once” did that as well, albeit in more non-linear fashion. I fell for a few of these, but it was nevertheless a major trend I noticed this year.
This begs me to ask the question: is there anything left to say in this medium? I remain somewhat hopeful. The new year will bring us films from Scorsese, Fincher, Wes Anderson, Glazer, Nolan, Mann, McQueen, Haynes, Payne, Lanthimos, Aster, and many more. Let’s hope it’s their turn to have us hold their beers.