2019 was a strong year for movies led by three of my all-time favorites — Taika Waititi's Jojo Rabbit, a wildly-funny and deeply-moving comedy about a goofy ten year old Hitler Youth (and his imaginary pal, Adolf) who discovers the Jewish girl his mother is hiding in the attic and learns what it really means to be a Nazi; Little Women, Greta Gerwig's brilliant refashioning of the Louisa May Alcott classic; and Quentin Tarantino's last film to date, Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood, a comedy about has-been actors and, sure, why not, the Manson family.
They were beautiful, funny, exciting ... and proof that Hollywood can make movies that are both wholly original works of genius and crowd-pleasing ticket-sellers.
You can rank them in whatever order you want.
And though this an alternate Oscar blog, for once the Academy's pick for best picture, Parasite — another wholly original crowd pleaser — is also a great movie. You can't go wrong there.
As for the rest, well, they're pretty great, too. The Avengers: Endgame, the final installment in the Avengers series, stuck the landing, and if Marvel had quit there, they would have gone out on top. Knives Out is a nifty whodunit comedy (I like its sequel, Glass Onion, even better). Ford v. Ferrari made me care deeply about a subject I really don't care about. 1917 is a taut action picture about World War I, one of the bloodiest and most meaningless armed conflicts in human history. And I love all John Wick movies.
Which leaves The Irishman by Martin Scorsese. Definitely not my cup of tea but it made your top ten so here it is.
But you can only pick one, right?
After a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, I went with Little Women, not only my favorite film of the year but my pick as the best movie of the decade.
In case you haven't read the novel or seen any of its many film or TV adaptations, Little Women is the story of the March sisters (Jo, Amy, Meg and Beth, played here by, respectively, Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, Emma Watson and Eliza Scanlen) who come of age in Concord, Massachusetts during the American Civil War. The novel opens on Christmas day and follows the girls as they mature into young women, experiencing along the way love, tragedy and loads of comic misadventures.
It's a beloved tale and its film adaptations — particularly the 1933 version starring Katharine Hepburn and 1994's with Winona Ryder — have been commercial and critical hits. But let's be honest, the plot has problems that not even Louisa May Alcott was able to solve and I confess I wasn't exactly tingling with anticipation when I heard Greta Gerwig was taking yet another crack at this old chestnut.
Boy, was I wrong.
Five minutes into it, I was sold on Gerwig's time-shifting storyline. Ten minutes later (and many years earlier) — when the young Jo and neighbor Laurie (Timothée Chalamet) dance outside on the porch at a fancy ball — I was exhilarated. And by the final scene, when ... well, I won't spoil it for you ... I felt in my bones that Greta Gerwig had finally licked the unsatisfying ending that plagued the original novel.
I watch it every time it shows up on cable.
Gerwig drew on Alcott's journals and letters to flesh out the screenplay and reveal the frustrations and desires that drove Alcott to write Little Women in the first place.
"Women, they have minds, and they have souls, as well as hearts," Jo March says at one point. "And they've got ambition, and they've got talent, as well as beauty. I'm so sick of people saying that love is all a woman is fit for. I'm just so sick of it!
"But — I am so lonely."
It's a recurring theme in Gerwig's work: what is the role of an ambitious woman in a society that only values her for one thing? It's not an idle question — this is the central issue driving politics and dividing people all over the world.
I won't say Greta Gerwig's leap from first-time director to one of the all-time greats is the fastest on record — Orson Welles did after all direct Citizen Kane his first time out of the box — but still, the progression from Lady Bird to Little Women to the billion-dollar Barbie is astonishing. At this point she could direct a movie about the phone book and I'd be in line to buy a ticket.
Little Women is currently playing on Hulu. Seriously, see it. Today. Highly recommended.
A note before you vote: Brad Pitt won a well-deserved best supporting actor award for his work in Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood. But in watching the movie again, I see that he was definitely a co-lead with Leonardo DiCaprio. Not to mention, Pitt did very good work that same year in Ad Astra, an outer space retelling of Heart of Darkness. So I bumped him up to the lead category where he belongs.
We occasionally do things like that here at the Monkey ...
In his stead, I voted Tom Hanks his second alternate Oscar (to go with two real ones) for his turn as Mister Rogers in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. Tom Hanks can play anything — an astronaut, a soldier, a dying AIDS patient, a thirteen year old kid, a castaway, the lead in a rom-com, a pilot, a ship's captain, an FBI agent, a hard-drinking ballplayer, Forrest Gump, and a children's TV host in sneakers and a cardigan — and make you believe it. Yet somehow he's strangely underrated. A great actor.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. Best animated feature winners are noted with an @. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
Green Book is a nice little odd couple movie about racism in the early 1960s, and Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali (who won his second Oscar in support) are very good in it. But the best picture of the year? I didn't see that coming.
I'd argue that two other best picture nominees — Black Panther and BlacKkKlansman — have much more interesting, and frankly, more entertaining things to say about race relations in America.
The former, the first entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe with a primarily Black cast, is the story of T'Challa (Chadwick Boseman), the newly crowned king of Wakanda, who must decide whether to use his hidden kingdom's immense power and wealth to help the world or to take revenge for centuries of colonialist exploitation. The film was a smash hit and a cultural phenomenon.
The latter, Spike Lee's most successful movie since 2006's Inside Man, is the true story of a Black FBI agent (John David Washington) who infiltrated the Klan in the 1970s. Funny and infuriating at the same time — racists are so stupid and unfortunately so real.
For my money, both are not only better than Green Book but are also more likely to stand the test of time. But that could just be me. Hats off to the Academy for nominating all three of them.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. Best animated feature winners are noted with an @. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
A couple of first-time directors announced their presence with authority in 2017.
Heretofore known as half of the comedy team Key & Peele, Jordan Peele wrote and directed the best horror movie in years, Get Out, about a young Black photographer who visits his White girlfriend's liberal parents only to discover that all the new politics is just a fresh way of expressing all the old evils.
Peele, who won an Oscar for his screenplay, asks whether anything has really changed if the same self-serving monsters are still running the show — all while scaring your pants off.
And then there was Greta Gerwig, an actress in such critically-acclaimed features as Frances Ha and 20th Century Women, who wrote and directed the autobiographical story of a high school fish-out-of-water (Saoirse Ronan) who has reinvented herself as "Lady Bird" — an aspiring artist chaffing against the strictures of her loving, hardworking but utterly conventional mom (Laurie Metcalf).
Oscar nominations all around (picture, director, actress, supporting actress, screenplay).
Gerwig would go on to bigger and better things — 2019's hit remake of Little Women, and 2023's billion dollar box office bonanza, Barbie. But it was the surprise success of Lady Bird that opened the door.
Along with Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk, a couple of quirky hits that took home Oscars — The Shape of Water and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri — and the shockingly fabulous comedy Paddington 2 about a talking bear with a taste for marmalade, 2017 was an all around good year for movies.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. Best animated feature winners are noted with an @. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
This is the first Oscar year where I (mostly) relied on you, my faithful readers, to vet the potential nominees.
The top three movies among critics in 2016 were Moonlight, La La Land, and Manchester by the Sea, in roughly that order.
Moonlight and Manchester are thoughtful, well-made art films that never quite drew me in.
As for La La Land, a celebrated musical that won the Oscar for best picture until it didn't (oopsy!), well, I'll bet I could name 100 musicals I liked better. 130, in fact, if my own IMDB ratings can be trusted.
Your mileage my vary.
Any nominees I did like? But of course.
Arrival is a slow-burn sci-fi thriller featuring the incomparable Amy Adams. Deadpool, starring a personal favorite, Ryan Reynolds, is a hilariously foulmouthed send-up of the superhero genre. Hell or High Water is a modern-day cowboy noir written by Taylor Sheridan of TV's Yellowstone fame. Hidden Figures is a terrific biopic about the African-American women who were the backbone of NASA's computer science team during the early years of the space race. Love & Friendship is a very funny comedy of manners based on a novella by Jane Austen. And Rogue One is the best Star Wars movie since the first one back in 1977.
Have at it.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. Best animated feature winners are noted with an @. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
Jason Statham has 56 credits on imdb.com. I've seen exactly half of them. Which makes me wonder how I missed the other half.
Gotta stop wasting time on things like sleep. And food.
Wish I could remember the TV series — In Plain Sight? Justified? — where one cop says to another, what'd you think of Downton Abbey (or some such) and the other guy shakes his head and says, "Not enough Jason Statham."
That about covers it for me. There hasn't been a movie made that wouldn't improve with the casting of Jason Statham, up to and including Gone With the Wind. If Jason Statham ever looks at you and says, "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn," you better duck for cover — the bullets are flying!
So what are my favorite Jason Statham performances? Glad you asked! (And if you didn't ask, you have my permission to skip down to the voting.) Here's a list of my top seven (a nice, even number). These are not limited to movies he headlines — he's often better in support and my list reflects that.
7. The Beekeeper (2024) — The distilled essence of a Jason Statham B-picture, here he plays a retired commando, lying low as a handy man who likes to keep bees. When his kindly landlady (Phylicia Rashad) commits suicide after getting fleeced by a network of scam artists, he sets out to get his revenge. You do not want to make this guy mad — by comparison, Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry looks like a volunteer for the Peace Corps. I could have picked any number of Jason Statham action pictures here — The Transporter 1, 2 or 3, Crank, The Mechanic and its sequels, Parker, etc. — but this is the most stylish of the bunch.
6. Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019) — Jason Statham came late to the neverending Fast & Furious franchise which has gotten more and more ludicrous (which is to say better) as it has gone along. I'll let Hobbs & Shaw stand in for all of them. Jason Statham as Deckard Shaw and Dwayne Johnson as Luke Hobbs are frenemies who must join forces to retrieve a deadly virus from an ex-MI6 agent (Idris Elba) who's gone into business for himself. The plot is beside the point — the pleasure here is watching the chemistry between Statham and Johnson, the Tracy and Hepburn of the Fast & Furious movies (I'll let you decide which is who).
5. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) — The first of director Guy Ritchie's Cockney gangster comedies. A lot of Tarantino and Elmore Leonard in its DNA, but also uniquely well-acquainted with the London underworld. The story revolves around a rigged card game, a half-million pound debt, a heist, a pair of antique shotguns, bags of cash, bags of drugs, shootouts, beatings, kidnappings, a traffic warden, and so many twists and turns, there's no point in trying to keep track. Like God, Guy Ritchie works in mysterious ways and he'll explain himself in his own good time. Or not. Statham in his first screen role, plays a friend of the duped card player, loyal, true, and like most criminals, only half as smart as he thinks he is.
4. The Bank Job (2008) — Statham heads up a crew of thieves who tunnel into a bank vault over a long London weekend. Based on a true story, what they find there rocks the British establishment. Statham plays a family man living the straight life but who agrees to do a favor for a friend. Intricate plot, lots of twists, and plenty of period 1971 detail. Note: I could have gone here with the 2003 remake of The Italian Job, which stars Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, Edward Norton and Donald Sutherland. Another nifty heist picture with Statham playing Handsome Rob in solid support.
3. Wrath of Man (2021) — I generally prefer funny Jason Statham to serious Jason Statham but this serious Jason Statham is terrific. He's a father grieving the loss of his son killed during an armored car heist. But of course he's more than that — he's Jason Statham! What, you were expecting Steel Magnolias? Co-starring Josh Harnett, Andy Garcia, Eddie Marsan and Jeffrey Donovan. Directed by Guy Ritchie, it's must-see Jason Statham, but a word of warning: make sure you go into this one with the right expectations. There's none of the usual humor to lighten the mood or relieve the tension.
2. Snatch (2000) — Snatch is the (barely) more comprehensible follow-up to Guy Ritchie's surprise hit, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. It's another Cockney gangster comedy and it's even better than the first, with an all-star cast that includes Brad Pitt, Benicio Del Toro, Dennis Farina, Vinnie Jones — and of course, Jason Statham. The plot revolves around ... oh, who cares. What you want to watch is the interaction between Brad Pitt — playing a bare-knuckle boxer with an accent so thick even the Brits need subtitles — and Jason Statham who desperately needs this loose cannon to hit what he aims at. I think you could argue this is the best film on Ritchie's résumé (which also includes the aforementioned Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Sherlock Holmes, its sequel A Game of Shadows, The Man from Uncle, The Gentlemen, Wrath of Man, and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare).
1. Spy (2015) — Not the best movie Jason Statham was ever in, but his best performance. A spoof of every James Bond movie ever made, Spy stars Melissa McCarthy as a CIA desk-jockey who winds up in the field on the trail of a stolen nuclear warhead. Statham's character, Rick Ford — described in the press kit as a cross between Rambo and Inspector Clouseau — is a perfect send-up of every character the actor has ever played and while he's almost always wryly funny, it's a shock just how great he is at straight up comedy. With Rose Byrne, Jude Law and Allison Janney.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. Best animated feature winners are noted with an @. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
On its surface, The Grand Budapest Hotel is a shaggy dog story about how a hotel lobby boy (Tony Revolori) became the richest man in Europe. But ultimately, it's a contemplation of grace under pressure, kindness in the face of cruelty, beauty in an ugly world.
Set in the years between the two world wars, Ralph Fiennes plays the lobby boy's mentor, Monsieur Gustave H, the concierge of the Grand Budapest, eastern Europe's finest hotel. Gustave meets his guests' every need, especially the needs of rich, lonely women — not, mind you, from any motivation as mundane as reflexive servitude or the Puritan work ethic but because he is a civilized man who finds pleasure and meaning in creating a bubble of civilization for those fleeing an uncivilized world.
"You see, there are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity. Indeed that's what we provide in our own modest, humble, insignificant ... oh, fuck it."
Like the inchworm measuring the marigolds, Gustave labors unceasingly despite knowing that in the long run it won't make the slightest bit of difference. But what's the alternative? Surrender to chaos and cruelty and death? Hell, no.
If sooner or later we're all going to die anyway, can't we at least do it with a bit of grace and good humor? And in Gustave's case, poetry and perfume and pastry, as well?
There's something generous and moving and maybe even heroic in Gustave's devotion to the better angels of our nature.
"Rudeness is merely an expression of fear. People fear they won't get what they want. The most dreadful and unattractive person only needs to be loved, and they will open up like a flower."
Well, some of them anyway.
As it turns out, Ralph Fiennes is the perfect actor to lead a Wes Anderson film. He can deliver helium-filled balloons of dialogue without puncturing the illusion that he actually believes what he's saying. And in a film like this, that's absolutely vital. One prick of cynicism, and the balloon bursts.
This is Fiennes best work since Schindler's List.
Cameos by everyone — Bill Murray, Ed Norton, Harvey Keitel, Jude Law, Tom Wilkinson, F. Murray Abraham, Jason Schwartzman, Tilda Swinton, Owen Wilson, Bob Balaban, Léa Seydoux, and many others.
Excellent supporting work from Adrien Brody, Willem Defoe, Jeff Goldblum and Saoirse Ronan.
Tony Revolori as the lobby boy, Zero Moustafa, was terrific. Ralph Fiennes deserved an Oscar nomination at the very least.
The Grand Budapest Hotel was 2014's best movie, Wes Anderson its best director.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. Best animated feature winners are noted with an @. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
