Media Journal: Best Movies of 2020
It's become a yearly tradition for me to put together a Best Of The Year list for the media I enjoyed in that year. And goodness knows, this is a year when a lot of us needed media to get thru the year. Movies, shows, videogames, and comics helped me get thru a really difficult time, and some of them have become my new favorites.
This is the first of three best of the year lists to be posted this week. For all three lists, any media is eligible, regardless of what year it came out.
1) Weathering With You
Four years ago, Your Name supplanted my previous favorite film of all time, Spirited Away. It was a sweet and touching, albeit slightly melodramatic, love story involving a lot of body-swapping in the first half. I saw it right when I needed to, as I was figuring out my gender. Makoto Shinkai's follow-up film, released this year, had a lot to live up to.
I'm shocked to find that Weathering With You is already vying for the top slot as my favorite film of all time, despite having only been released this year. It's also a love story set in a slightly magical Japan, but a lot of what Shinkai was trying to do with Your Name has been tightened up here. While Your Name kluged together a few different plot devices to tell its tale, including body swapping and time travel, Weathering With You tells a much more cohesive story about personal responsibility and love in a time of crisis. My friends found its ending divisive; I found it uplifting. I saw this film in January, but I've been thinking about it ever since, all year.
2) TIE: The Lego Batman Movie / The Lego Ninjago Movie /
The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
I saw The Lego Movie in theaters in 2014, but only this year did I finally get around to seeing the other three films in Warner Bros.' attempt at a Lego cinematic universe. I'm honestly quite impressed, and a bit disappointed in myself for not supporting the movies in theaters when I had the chance.
The Lego Batman Movie is my least favorite of the three, but it's as solid of a Batman movie as you can get. I tend to prefer Batman stories that cast a wide focus on the entire Bat-family, and this does that, with an absolutely silly enormous cast of villain characters too.
The Lego Ninjago Movie feels a lot like Power Rangers, which I also watched a lot of this year. It's not very original, but it's solid action and quite a lot of fun, and I found myself quite endeared to its characters and world.
The Lego Movie 2 caps off the series with my favorite entry to date. It's imaginative, it's sweet, it deepens the characters from the original movie, and it's got a ton of great new characters and songs. ("This song's gonna get stuck inside your head!!") It doesn't hurt that this movie features the most prominent female characters in the series, including quite a lot of screentime for Wyldstyle. Of all the movies, this is the one that I'm gonna be seeking out Lego sets for in the future.
3) Clue
First of two items on this list that I call "how had I not seen this yet?" I've been trying to see this movie for years, and now I've finally gotten around to it.
There are just so many incredible moments in Clue. ("If there's anyone in here... just look out!") My roommates have been quoting it continuously for ages, and now I can join in. Every actor is having far, far too much fun. ("Flames... on the side of my face.") This was also just a great follow-up to my favorite movie of 2019, Knives Out, another mansion murder mystery, which even stole one of Clue's jokes outright.
4) Die Hard
So clearly, Die Hard is an action movie standard for a reason. As I was watching this, I kept thinking of Raiders of the Lost Ark, a movie in which pretty much every single action scene has become iconic. Alan Rickman plays the most deeply fun villain of just about any movie or show I've ever seen, and Bruce Willis is really good in it too.
It's also a Christmas movie, since that's the main discourse that comes up with this movie now. This movie really wants to remind you every other scene that it's Christmas, and its hero even has a very Christmas-esque change of heart. Overall, I was extremely surprised how well this held up.
5) 1917
Well, I only saw two movies in theaters this year, so it's a good thing both of them were good. 1917 feels as much like a very well-produced video game as it does a movie, but at least it's a fun video game, where something interesting is happening most of the time.
The "we did this all in one shot" gag is so obviously constructed that it's hard to ignore that aspect while watching. In contrast, Birdman from 2014 has very very long sequences where it's difficult to tell if there was a cut, and the performers just had to memorize huge pieces of dialogue and just go for it. There was an innate tension in Birdman because I just couldn't believe that the camera was still rolling. 1917 feels very artificial in comparison.
And yet... well, it has some really standout performances that raise this movie above its gag. It's thinly written, but moments from the film still haunt me, and that's exactly what a World War I movie should do. "I had hoped today would be a good day," says one character. Big 2020 mood, y'all.