Being the film buff that I am (watch out Gregg Turkington), I saw a decent amount of films in the theatre last year. It helped that Harkins, the great theatre an hour away down the hill, sold popcorn passes. ($30 bucks for free popcorn everytime you go to the theatre for a year!)
Now hold on a second actually… I wrote that paragraph above before I even started compiling my list. I just wrote down a few of my favorite films of the year, and then I realized I barely had any to fill up a Top 10 list. It actually seems that my girlfriend and I only seen 15 movies in the theatre this year! I am actually a shit film buff.
Maybe there weren’t that many great films this year. Or maybe I just didn’t catch them. I didn’t watch several films that I definitely want to check out; all of which had the high possibility of making it onto this list: Sorry to Bother You, BlackKklansman, First Man, Game Night, Annihilation, Incredibles 2, and The Favourite. Part of this is that I didn’t have the time to go see some of these given I have to drive an hour away from my house down this damn hill, and another part is just not knowing about some of them until their time had already passed. Oh well.
Anyways, here are my favorite movies of the year.
Now hold up. That was supposed to be my super smooth transition into my list, but I just gotta add one more note. I just realized only two of the films in my list I love a lot. One is awesome but not quite up there with the two superb titles. Then the last two are pretty damn good. This is disappointing. It feels like I’m forcing the list. There’s no competition for what last place is. In 2017, there were so many contenders that I had to scrap. I just want you all to know that this isn’t the best list ever. No doubt those movies I listed above would’ve put a fire under these films’ asses. Still, I stand strongly by the top two candidates.
5) Isle of Dogs
Wes Anderson is my dog yo. He will always come through with a quirky and hilarious film. His films will never not be interesting. And that’s certainly the case for this one. It’d take a damn heart surgeon to manage this story of Japan getting rid of all their dogs in such a incredibly clean manner. Yet Anderson pulls it off with immense style and swag.
4) A Star is Born
Screw all that rock n’ roll and pop bullsheet. I’m a metal head y’all. Yet even this metal head was enamored by this coming to fame story of Lady Gaga’s character. You won’t get to experience much like the first half of this film. Cooper really handles this part so damn beautifully. The songs are absolutely touching, the dialogue is so human and yet funny, and their love is intoxicating and addicting. Cooper decides to put more of the spotlight on himself towards the end, and the film is pretty damn long for some sort of musical, so the film suffers. But that first half. That’s beautiful.
3) Ant-Man and the Wasp
Edgar Wright. Never forget.
Ant-Man has proven to be one of the coolest, funniest characters in the MCU. Ant-Man introduced us to him and his gang in the first one, Civil War threw us on our freaking heads with Giant-Man, and Ant-Man and the Wasp gives us more of what made the first one so damn good: more Paul Rudd. Sure, there’s other stuff that makes it interesting and different from the first—like a very handsome looking boat captain. But Paul Rudd is a winning formula just by himself baby.
2) Spider-Man: Into the Verse
My girlfriend and I knew there were a lot of good films showing at the theatre, so we wanted to knock out a couple in one visit. So we decided to check out Widows by Steve McQueen, one of the best film directors. It was pretty good. I really don’t care for political thrillers, and this was one of those. I think on a second watching that I might pick up on some of the hidden meanings behind everything, but until then, I’m mainly stuck in the dark about what it all meant. After that, we went to go see Into the Verse. I knew that Widows might not be the funnest given McQueen’s previous track record, so I wanted to end out the night on a positive note.
And boy what a positive note. The most positive of all the notes! Into the Verse is one of the best looking animated films ever made, if not the best. It was absolutely hilarious—no surprise given it had the help of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. The characters and story were phenomenal. Just everything about this film is perfection. Who would’ve thought that an animated version of Spider-Man would be one of the best versions yet.
1) Avengers: Infinity War
Christ. I keep on breaking away from this piece to add all these side notes. I gotta add the side notes though! I mean 60% of these damn films are superhero films! Five years ago, I wouldn’t have had any superhero films in my list of favorite films of the year. Have I gotten away from that artsy side? A bit. What else has changed then? Well, super hero films have become bonafide amazing films. That’s what I say to myself, but it’s not like they weren’t amazing films though before.
A decade ago, Marvel came out with Iron Man. I saw it in the theatre with my family, and it blew me away. I’d never heard of this superhero, yet they made me love him. And at the end of it, they teased a super team coming together. They went with the genius idea to reveal this through Samuel damn Jackson. The idea of a superhero film with some of the greatest superheroes coming together all in one film had me so damn hyped as a 12 year old. Yet something happened after a year or two: my interest in superhero films faded. I got interested in deeper films, Oscar caliber stuff. Gone were the superheroes. In were the deeply damaged, complex souls. Avengers came out, and I didn’t watch it. That superhero dream team film no longer interested me. It came out, and I didn’t watch it because I had no interest in it.
Something changed after several years. Around when I was 17 and in college, I wanted to check out The Winter Soldier for some reason. I remembered my good friend Ethan had said the action was amazing in the film. And you can trust Ethan on this stuff. Back in 2014, he and I knew that The Raid and The Raid 2 were some of the best fighting films ever made. Now, I’m not sure what gave me the final push to see the film. I think it was that Avengers: Age of Ultron was coming out, and for some reason, I wanted to watch it. So I thought I’d catch up on some of the superhero films I had missed.
I started with Captain America: The First Avenger. It was fine. Very cheesy but, ultimately, a good time. Then we watched Winter Soldier. My girlfriend and I were blown away. The fighting was remarkable. Every punch and kick was felt. It was nasty for a superhero film. Not only that, but the story was dark and twisted. A government conspiracy theory turned true? That edgy part of me liked it, while it was also immediately tangible and likable. This showed me that superhero films were much more than I had cast away. I was sucked back into superhero films. I would go on to watch Civil War, Doctor Strange, Guardians of the Galxy Vol. 2, Spider-Man: Homcoming, Thor: Ragnarok, and Black Panther all in theatres. And I loved watching them all. Marvel has truly done a great job building the superhero franchise that I would’ve went ballistic for as a kid.
And that brings me to Infinity War. A decade’s worth of films, and a film trying to tie it all together. It could’ve failed so easily. It would’ve if in the hands of the incompetent DC universe. But Marvel’s track record is too stunning. They would combine all the characters from the Marvel films that we loved, and they’d do it with damn ease—huge shout out to the Russo brothers who helped make this possible!
The combinations of the characters they chose worked so damn good. Star Lord’s deep insecurity around Thor with Thor’s unabashedness is tremendous. Doctor Strange butting heads with Iron Man is so damn satisfying. There are so many combinations of superheroes here, and they all work stunningly. The payoff of seeing all these characters on the screen with each other is incredible. No film has ever had this big of a payoff before. But all the characters being here shows the hardship is something never before seen in a film before. Usually one of the superheroes being in a film is enough to beat the villain. Not here. And all of them combined wasn’t even enough. The despair in figuring this out is as dark as an unbleached b-hole.
This is the darkest film in the whole Marvel series. It’s up there with Logan. This is due to one of the best villains in a film ever: Thanos. His proposal of killing off half of all living animals sounds a lot like Samuel Jackson’s in Kingsmen. But unlike Valentine’s plan there’s a sincerity in Thanos’s plan. Thanos would be willing to die for his plan. He rolled a two sided die when he snapped his fingers. One that had a 50% chance of killing him. But it didn’t. Instead, it killed 50% of the superheroes that I had grown to love. And it hurt so damn much to see it happen. Growing up with these superheroes and then seeing them turn to nothing broke my heart. And that’s why this is one of the greatest films ever, one of the best superhero films ever, and the best film of 2018.