Covid paved paradise and put up an empty movie theater parking lot for 2020 and the first half of 2021. However, the wonders of science gave us the vaccine, which has allowed me to go out and see movies on the big screen again. While I’ve been eager to get out and go see some great films, the best stuff this year so far has been on the small screen, with the Top 3 being streamers and numbers 4 and 5 being smaller films I happened to see a little bigger. In any event, so far 2021 has been a chill easing back into big screen movie watching, and also gave me a story or two I won’t soon forget!
Disclaimer: I’m not counting the February Oscar movies here, just the 2021 entertainment vehicles the first half of this year. So let’s see what’s been good!
That’s right. The “Nicholas Cage raises a pig in the woods searching for truffles” movie is one of the best 10 films of the year so far. That’s in large part thanks 2 two people. The Cage man himself delivers a stellar, subdued performance of a broken man searching for that zest for living. The other is writer/director Michael Sarnoski, who takes the revenge pig flick and makes the tale a shocking meditation on the joys, failures, and limits, of the American Dream.
There’s a lot of buzz about Steven Spielberg remaking West Side Story this year. No offense, to ol’ Steve here, but that movie came out already this summer in the form of Lin Manuel-Miranda’s joyous ode to a special part of New York City: Washington Heights. Anthony Ramos lights up the screen as Usnavy, one of many characters chasing hustles and big dreams, in hopes to live the life they want to live. The only real complaint here is the movie is overflowing with story to tell, excitedly bouncing from interesting character to interesting character, reminding everyone the joys of living the good life and being young and alive.
Disney Animation has been cranking out winners since 2013’s Wreck-It-Ralph. In this newest winner, the animators use new settings (Southeast Asia) with the familiar Disney adventure formula. The result is a story we understand with a world we don’t, making the adventure that much more interesting and worthwhile. Plus, the movie lucked into the prescient theme of learning to trust others we don’t understand, and how leaps of faith can sometimes yield the greatest rewards. And if that doesn’t work, there’s effing dragons y’all!
Most of the great space epics have been based in very American sensibilities, dreams and beliefs. Which is why this Korean spin on Guardians of the Galaxy is so welcome. We get new world ideas we haven’t seen before (due to the rush into space, humanity is a jumbled mess of multiple cultures/languages for example) and a more targeted focus on the haves/have nots when it comes to space travel. But what lasts are the amazing crew of the space sweeping Victory, filled with some of the most off the wall mish mosh mix em up of people this world has to offer. I could have even probably just done a whole movie of them riffing off of each other in the spaceship, vicious and sweet somehow at the same time.
If you thought Guardians of the Galaxy James Gunn was something cool, wait till you see his r rated superhero self. This is the superhero story Gunn was born to tell, with a big “F*ck You” tattooed somewhere on Harley Quinn’s body. This suicide squad quickly sheds itself of its garbage predecessor, with Gunn deliriously erasing that film from existence in 10 glorious minutes. The rest of the movie is fun as hell too, with the random hodgepodge of weirdo supers creating chaotic fun with ludicrous violence in all the best ways, led by a dimwit shark man voiced by Sylvester Stallone.
What Booksmart wanted to be. The ladies of Fort William up & craft one of the great coming of age movies in recent memory. What makes this Scottish gem stand out is that the movie gives us 6 totally different girls with totally different points of view, taking us on specific and ubiquitous adventures simultaneously with them, exploring sexuality, friendship, and the future. Plus, the 90s setting gives the movie a wonderful soundtrack and simplifies the story to be just about young small town girls living in lonely worlds taking trains to the big city.
Someone once said that if your opening sentence of your story goes “And then the murders began” your story is immediately 25% more interesting. Well, what if your story starts “You wanna hear a story about how me and this bitch fell out? It’s kind of long, but it’s full of suspense.”? Well, what follows is an American tale Mark Twain would be proud of, with Taylour Paige’s Zola taken on an insane road trip to Florida by Riley Keough’s walking cultural appropriation Stefani. Within real life Zola’s tweet storm is a shockingly deep tale about lies we tell ourselves and the power of persuasion, while also an amazing mixture of satire, violence, sex, and suspense.
Like a bat out of some underground Shadyside hell, this Netflix horror trilogy showed up 3 straight weeks and up and delivered on its great RL Stine inspired premise: life in the murder capital of the United States. Leigh Janiak’s vision is a master class of world building, giving us the evolution of Shadyside Ohio from its humble beginnings to its terrifying present day. Janiak sucks us in with homages to various horror genres (Scream, Friday the 13th you’ll recognize immediately), but while doing so, concocts an undercurrent of multiple storylines and mysteries we have to solve along the way, culminating in a brilliant Part 3 twist and glorious ending that left me wholly satisfied with the surprise of the summer.
Was it even possible for Sony to one up their incredible 2018 animated hit Into the Spiderverse? For me, that’s a resounding hell yeah with this joy of a film. This Netflix movie finds that perfect family entertainment working on multiple levels, as a stressful family road trip to college collides with an AI enslaving the planet, with the Mitchell’s the only family left to deal with the problem. It’s got a million jokes a minute, really fun side characters, and a big gooey heart, culminating in one of the greatest thought out punchlines to shutting down a computer that I have seen, that I teared up from laughing so hard.
The winner of the streaming wars so far in 2021 is Hulu, releasing this Questlove jaunt. Unbeknownst to most of the population, there was another amazing summer festival in 1969 besides Woodstock: the Harlem Cultural festival, featuring amazing acts like Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight, Mahalia Jackson, and Nina Simone, among other great African-American, Puerto Rican, and other cultural acts that lived in Harlem at the time. Questlove takes the recently discovered footage of this amazing fest and frames it in the context of the black, Latino, and black Latino populations at the time, as well as the artists state of mind (as most are still alive). What we get is one of the great musical documentaries of all time, showcasing amazing talent that also has a powerful message and purpose: to celebrate and value culture to uplift the people inside of that culture that don’t get represented as much as they should.
