All posts by Engagingculture

I'm a normal guy who watches a lot of movies. I love to compare techniques, cinematography, and acting, but I'm really amazed at what makes movies successful. Why does one film make piles of money while another falls flat on its face? I hope to help other normal people enjoy more good movies and avoid the garbage.
2010s, Action, Animation, Awards, Best Movie Bracket, Comedy, Crime, Documentary, Family, Lists, Reviews, Science Fiction, Top 3, Uncategorized

2018 Best Movie Bracket

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From my best count, there were about 266 major films released in 2018. That includes all the tentpole blockbusters and the independent festival darlings. It also includes the most prominent foreign films which received a US release and major original releases from streaming platforms. Of those 266, I have seen 111. I’ve still got about 50 for 2018 on my watchlist, but I will probably never see the vast majority of those unless I get a government grant that allows me to stop working and do nothing but watch movies all day every day.

I track and rate all of the movies I watch at Letterboxd.com. Since I usually do this list as a top 3, it is convenient that I have exactly 3 movies from 2018 that I would classify as five-star films. That number may increase because I have a rule that no film can be rated as 5 stars based upon a single viewing. The highest I can go on one viewing is 4 1/2 stars.

Honorable Mentions

It was a very good year for film. I could just list off 20 films that were easily in the running for my top film of the year, but in addition to my top three, I want to highlight a few special films that were unique or extraordinary in some way.

A Quiet Place surprised me because I didn’t expect such an immersive story from Jim from the Office. Upgrade was the best Science-Fiction action film with its locked camera Logan Marshall-Green’s face/body acting split. Mission-Impossible: Fallout was easily the most entertaining film I saw all year, I could watch it a dozen times and still be ready for another go around. 

Leave No Trace is Debra Granik’s long-awaited follow-up to Winter’s Bone (2019) and it was heartbreaking and uplifting and hopeful and brutally honest. BlackkKlansman is Spike Lee’s best since Malcolm X. It caught you laughing about systemic racism and how dumb those Klan members could be then flipped the script and left me with my mouth hanging open and tears in my eyes. Shoplifters left me wanting to be kidnapped and loved so purely whether it is technically a family or not. Finally, I’m so sad to leave First Reformed out of my top three, Paul Schrader had my rapt attention with an arresting meditation on faith’s place in the modern world.

Top Three

3. Blindspotting

The year was filled with amazing films focused on the theme of race relations. We’ve already mentioned BlackkKlansman, but there was also If Beale Street Could Talk, The Hate U Give, and Sorry to Bother You. However, the best, in my opinion, was the one that was criminally overlooked, Blindspotting.

The story is pretty simple. Collin, played masterfully by Daveed Diggs (whom you might know as Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson in Hamilton), must make it through his final three days of probation for a chance at a new beginning. Despite his childhood best friend Miles (a solid introduction from newcomer and co-writer Raphael Casal) not being the best influence, Collin is loyal. That countdown clock comes under pressure when Collin witnesses a police shooting and the two men’s friendship is tested as they wrestle with their identity in their rapidly-gentrifying Oakland neighborhood.

I don’t understand why Lionsgate released this unbelievably prescient masterpiece in mid-July rather than holding it a little later for Awards season. It was electrifying while also remaining accessible. However, Blindspotting was released in the same summer as Childish Gambino’s firebrand This is America and it is a perfect companion piece. 

2. Won’t You Be My Neighbor

I wouldn’t usually even think of putting a documentary on my best films of the year, but I was so incredibly floored by Morgan Neville’s documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor. I grew up watching Mister Rogers every afternoon as a little kid and I even remember watching often into my teenage years. At some point, I probably kind of outgrew it and thought that he was uncool. But now looking back as an adult I see that Fred Rogers was the coolest guy in the neighborhood.

If there were one film in 2018 that I would force every person to watch it would be this. The faith, hope, and love that Fred Rogers exhibited in every show is a salve that I believe our culture needs now more than ever. Fred Rogers wasn’t seeking to entertain kids with his show and he wasn’t trying to rush them through growing up like so many try to. Instead, the yellow caution light flashes outside the building even before the familiar song begins as if to signal that it is time to slow down and learn what it means to be a human and how to live as a human with other humans. 

It didn’t fall into the trap of fawning over Mister Rogers. That’s good, because he would push back on being idolized in any way. Instead, he would call us to action, encouraging us to be better neighbors to all in hopes that this love and kindness might spread. Morgan Neville struck gold with this film and I only hope that it stays on constant rotation and that Fred Rogers is allowed to touch the hearts and minds of another generation and that my generation might be reminded of his gentle example.

1. Spider-Man Into The Spider-verse

I was not on the early bandwagon for Spider-Man Into the Spiderverse. I felt like it was too soon to do anything with Spider-Man much less introduce eight new ones. It wasn’t until I saw the sneak preview after Venom that I was even interested. I thought the animation looked great and I was intrigued by the concept and thought that it would be a good movie to take my kids to. However, about 15 minutes into the film, I knew I was watching something special. 

Let’s count the Spider-Men. First, we have Chris Pine’s stellar Peter Parker prime. He’s better than our Peter Parker and Spider-Man in every way except for the turn of events of this film. Second, we have Miles Morales, also from the home dimension of this film. Miles is played by Shameik Moore with bright-eyed energy. Then things get crazy with a whole slew of Spider-people.

Third, the road-weary veteran Peter B. Parker (Jake Johnson), complete with sweatpants, who is a sadder more tired version of the uber Spider-man. Fourth, Spider-Gwen, which I can easily see getting her own stand alone. Hailee Steinfeld brought some youthful confidence to the powerful girl’s role that will be seen over and over at Comic-con. Fifth, Spider-Man Noir, voiced in an amazing casting choice by Nicholas Cage. It’s seriously the best thing he’s done in years except destroying that pool table while singing the hokey pokey in Mom and Dad.

Sixth, Peni Parker, who shares a psychic connection to a radioactive spider that lives in her deceased father’s robot. I’m not making this up and she’s not even the weirdest. That award easily goes to seventh, Peter Porker (a.k.a Spider-Ham) a Looney Tunes type animated pig who actually started out as a spider but was bitten by a radioactive pig. In case you think I’m making this up, this is a comic you can actually read. Finally, eighth, featured just briefly in the post-credit scene is Oscar Isaac playing Miguel O’Hara as Spider-Man 2099. 

Somehow, all of this works and is magically told with no confusion and incredible balance and confidence. I haven’t even mentioned the supporting cast in Lily Tomlin, Katherine O’Hara, Mahershala Ali, and Liev Schriber among others. It is a truly star-studded cast and with all the right stuff.

So what do you think? Agree or disagree? Did I miss one of your favorites? Let me know in the comments below or on social media.

Action, Comedy, Drama, Genre, Horror, Longform, Romance, Video

Is Action really a Genre?

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Watch this original trailer for Drive (2011)

If you watched the above trailer for Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011) and then went into the theater expecting a balls-to-the-wall action-filled crime drama you would not be alone. Many people did exactly this and were very disappointed in Drive even though it is one of the best movies of that year and even this decade. The problem here was genre marketing.

Filmmakers, marketers, and audiences usually have a good relationship and that trust is built based upon certain expectations which have been developed over the years. That is what a genre is, a set of conventional storytelling patterns and expectations which filmmakers purposefully use and exploit to communicate within the medium of film.

This is what most of the film was actually like. Notice the difference?

I don’t think they knew how, or took the time to try, to sell a character-driven art-house neo-noir drama which has very little dialog and extensive sections of long takes broken up with scenes of intense, disturbing violence. Instead, they included nearly all of the dialogue from the film in the trailer and cut it as a standard action flick. The studio even had at least one lawsuit over this discrepancy. This is one example of the importance of genre. As the medium of film has developed, many different genres have emerged and risen to popularity as culture changes and as storytellers mold life into art.

Four Master Tools

With that in mind, you shouldn’t mistake genre for one of the four main storytelling tools. You’ll often see a list of movie genres and right at the top of the list will be action. However, Action is not a genre. You say, “Of course it is! It’s on IMDb.” It’s even on the sidebar list of categories on this site. But I think this is because the field of genre theory has not been able to formalize the popular nomenclature. When people ask, “What kind of movie is it?” They are looking for a simple definition and often the easiest definition is the primary tool that is used. This doesn’t really work though so inevitably the film just gets compared to other films.

It’s easy to call a movie an It is a tool that has been used in all films since audiences were frightened by a train rolling into the station. Action is what differentiates a motion picture from still photography.

Poster for the movie "Pulp Fiction"
© 1994 Miramax − All right reserved.

The four master tools are:

  • Action
  • Comedy
  • Drama
  • Romance

Most films will use one of these tools primarily, but that does not make it a genre. These tools are employed and blended by master storytellers to create. Consider Quentin Tarantino’s modern-classic Pulp Fiction as an example, you can see bits of all four master tools blended together in a way that defied any kind of conventional genre. That is why it was and is called cutting edge. Tarantino created something new and I think he sparked a genre of films that have lazily been called Tarantino-esque.

Using Master Tools in a Genre

So then what is a genre, you ask? As I said before, a genre is a set of conventional storytelling patterns and expectations which filmmakers purposefully use and exploit to communicate within the medium of film. The list of genres is long and it will continue to get longer as time goes on and stories continue to be told in new and exciting ways.

Let’s take another example and flesh this out. Horror is a well-established master genre and several movies like Scream and Cabin in the Woods have outlined those genre expectations and conventions while still living within the genre itself, but let’s dive even deeper down into one of its sub-genres, the zombie film.

Victor Halperin’s White Zombie starring Bela Lugosi is widely considered to be the first zombie movie and it plays heavily on the horror genre tropes. Bela Lugosi was well known for his famous turn as Dracula in 1931. The marketers used this star power and genre recognition and actually refer to Lugosi as Dracula in the trailer.

Zombies became a feature of religion, folklore, and storytelling in Haiti during the inhumane conditions of slavery. Plucked from their home and forced into terrible conditions, the slaves saw themselves as zombies; Dead inside, forced to do the will of their master. We didn’t see the first Zombie film until 1932 with the Bela Lugosi film White Zombie. It plays on the Haitian folklore much more than modern zombie stories which were solidified by the popularity of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in 1968 where the term zombies isn’t even used and his follow-up in 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, where the zombies have now come to represent mindless consumerism. This is appropriate because it was the unfettered desire for consumer goods like sugar and tobacco that led to the rise of slavery in the Caribbean.

Today, zombie movies come in all different shapes and sizes and they use the four master tools to shape the story. We can take each of the tools and apply them to the genre to create very different movies. Most zombie films tend towards the action tool more heavily because of the subject matter of aggressive flesh-eating creatures. So, it’s easy to think of zombie action film like World War Z (2013).

However, you can look at the other tools and find examples where those have risen to the surface within the Zombie genre framework. If we look at drama, we have encountered another word whose definition is amorphous at best. Drama has become a junk-drawer term that catches any kind of film that doesn’t neatly fall into other genres. I don’t think the word is bad, but doesn’t every film have drama? Drama is the development of characters in a realistic setting. It involves emotion and relationships and tells a humanistic story.

With this definition, we can see that movies as varied as The Shawshank Redemption, 12 Angry Men, and The Social Network can all be defined as drama, but that does little to help anyone get a sense of what to expect when they sit down to watch. I would postulate that these films are prison-escape, courtroom-legal, and biopic respectively.

So let’s take this tool of drama and elevate it above action in a zombie movie? Rather than blood and gore and chase scenes, you will get the emotional weight of a father losing his daughter to a disease he doesn’t fully understand. In other words, you get a movie like the overlooked Arnold Schwarzenegger film Maggie (2015).

If you really wanted to be a nit-picker you could roll the tool of romance into drama because they are very similar. However, there is enough material and difference to separate them in my opinion. So if you turn the drama in a zombie movie to the specific romantic emotion you would get a very odd juxtaposition, but it’s been done to good effect in the 2013 zombie romance Warm Bodies.

And finally, when you ramp up the comedy in a zombie movie and explore some of the absurd or humorous parts of a zombie apocalypse you get a movie like Zombieland, or better yet Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004).

These are four very different films but they all share the same subject matter and storytelling conventions. The zombies may have risen in different ways and the fight against their spread might be shown more or less prominently but the heart of the story is the same. People have become mindless killing creatures and those who remain are trying to protect themselves while seeking a cure or safety.

I hope this helps you see the depth of variety that exists in the world of film. I’m working on a guide to genre that will breakdown all the major tropes that we see in film and give some names to everything from the absurdest of French new wave cinema to the most realistic of documentary.