2019 Movie Year in Review
In 2018 I saw 39 movies, which my lowest total since I started posting these summaries in 2003. That record lasted one year, because in 2019 I saw only 37 movies. I had two entire months (May and September) where I didn't see even one movie, and two more (February and September) where I saw only one. Six of the movies were the ones from that year's Cleveland International Film Festival.
There were definitely other movies I wanted to see. At one point I told John, the director of the Cinematheque, that I suspected he was intentionally scheduling movies I really wanted to see when I was out of town or otherwise unavailable. At one point there were three weeks in a row with films I really wanted to see during my radio show; one week I actually got the person after me to cover so I could bail out early, but that's not sustainable. I basically never check the Cedar Lee schedule anymore. It's such a pain to get there that absent my long dead Monday Night Movie crew promising socialness and dinner afterward, it's not worth it. I went there once all year. Aside from that though, I find that my interest in mainstream movies is fading even more. There are certainly franchises like Marvel and Star Wars that I don't miss, but that number grows smaller all the time. I didn't do a big Oscar push either for 2019 or late in the year for 2020, because even the nominees often don't interest me much. I'm not sure if I'm getting old or if other interests are just taking my time.
As with previous years, I'm going to call out a few movies I particularly enjoyed here. I already covered the three Marvel movies I saw in 2019, so I won't recap those again.
- After seeing The Shining, I believe I'm down to four of Kubrick's films that I haven't seen yet, two of which are early works. Visually, The Shining is visually stunning, and I enjoyed it greatly, but I didn't find it scary at all in the way that I found the original novel scary. That seems like a critical flaw for a movie that is supposed to be a horror movie.
- Any year with a new film by Quentin Tarantino is at least an interesting film year, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is his best movie in a very long time, and arguably ever if you think it surpassed Pulp Fiction. I loved every minute of it. He managed to largely restrain his impulse to go over the top like he did in his last several movies, and the result was a movie that felt like it flew by despite being quite long. M, however, hated it. She somehow missed that the Manson family was involved when she saw the previews, and she walked out with 30 minutes to go.
- Apollo 11 tells the story of the most famous space mission ever almost solely via archival footage, with no narration. It's incredibly beautiful and movie, and about 10 million times better than last year's shitty First Man. On a side note, this was my first time at the Apollo Theater in Oberlin.
- I had never seen either Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior or Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, so when the Cinematheque showed the full series I made to sure to hit those. They are very good, although the third one is a bit more lighthearted in a way that other three films are not.
- Due to unfortunate coincidences, John Wick 3 - Parabellum I had to see John Wick 3 by myself. It manages to be very pretty and a lot of fun despite making much less sense. I liked the scene with the attack dogs causing mayhem a lot, and I definitely see a sequel.
- I saw two films in the theater for the second time. The Kurosawa samurai film Sanjuro was very good, although the big swordfight I celebrated when I ranked Kurosawa films was not as good as I recalled it. The Buster Keaton classic Steamboat Bill, Jr was still a lot of fun.
- Walking on Water followed Christo as his large scale installation Floating Piers moves from conception to installation. This is one art documentary that worries a lot more about bureaucracy than artistic process. It's weird and enjoyable for art fans.
I also saw a bunch of movies that tied into rock & roll in some way. All of them were fun in different ways.
- The best of these movies was Amazing Grace, which is essentially a film of the recording sessions for the gospel album Amazing Grace by the great Aretha Franklin. They basically filmed it in the middle of the week in a Los Angeles church, but asked the parishoners to come and respond as they would during services. There are a host of gosepl luminaries present as well to observe. You see Mick Jagger in the back of the room losing his shit, and you don't blame him because Aretha is amazing. The film sat around more than 40 years, at first due to technical issues and then because Aretha wasn't interested. After her passing it was released, and it is fantastic. This was my sole film at the Cedar Lee, and the small crowd featured a church group behind me that managed to stay quiet until she hit the title number and they started singing and Amening behind me. I didn't blame them a bit, because I was tempted to myself. If this had come out back in 1972, it would be one of the rock & roll movies everybody had seen at some point.
- Look, I love Aretha, and I'm not taking anything away from her, but my favorite soul singer is Sharon Jones, who I saw many times in concert in front of the Dap-Kings. Somehow, I had missed the documentary about her first, temporarily successful, battle with cancer when it played the theaters, so when the Rock Hall brought back Miss Sharon Jones! M and I were 100% on it. Concert footage Sharon isn't as good as the real thing, but it's all that I get but memories, so I'll take it. The only reason I don't have the soundtrack album is that it's just a rehash of the last several studio albums.
- My friend and longtime co-host Shari and I have now seen three different Rolling Stones films together, the most recent of which and in my opinion the best was Gimme Shelter at the Rock Hall. It's a movie about incredible musicianship and even more incredible incompetent management, which leads to a murder caught on film while the Stones are performing. M and I saw this with Shari and John before we saw the Stones themselves in July, and it was a great warm up.
- Shari and I also went together to see Rocketman, and we both really enjoyed it. I recognized far more Elton John songs that I would have guessed off-hand, and the bizarre Lurhmanesque musical numbers were a ton of fun. It's well worth seeing.
- We had the Stones, so now we have to have The Beatles.Yesterday was penned by the writer of Love Actually and About Time and feels very much like those films in tone. The difference here is that Yesterday has an entire soundtrack of Beatles hits. Jack is a struggling singer-songwriter who is hit by a car. When he wakes up, nobody remembers the Beatles but him, so he passes their songs off as his and shoots to stardom. Will Jack realize he's in love with his childhood sweetheart/old manager in time? Well, duh, it's that kind of movie. Who cares, it's the journey, and the journey is so much fun for Beatles fans. Ed Sheeran is a lot of fun as himself, giving Jack his big break and at one point calling himself Salieri to Jack's Mozart. Kate McKinnon chews the scenery as his manager. Look, the "things people forgot" makes no sense the way it's done (really, nobody has heard of tobacco and the world ended up more or less the same) but I don't care because every time the movie starts to totter the Beatles arrive again. And in case you have to ask, I like the Stones, but the Beatles are better.
- Blinded by the Light happens to be the name of one of my very favorite songs, although I like the popular version by Manfred Mann, not the Springsteen original. I do love Springsteen though, and so the coming of age film presented here is pretty much aimed at me and an assortment of other mostly middle-aged men, a description that matches all four people who were in the theater that night.
- I tend to enjoy documentaries that are about some slice of a thing I love. For years, a staple of my CIFF viewing has been documentaries about various parts of movie productions. This year, they moved over to rock & roll with the documentary The Show's the Thing: The Legendary Promoters of Rock. It turns out that the way bands were booked in America from the start of rock & roll through the late 1990s was actually pretty fascinating, and it gave plenty of excuses to feature some classic sets at famous venues.
Speaking of The Beatles, I don't think it was that great of a movie, but the opening 5 minutes of Jojo Rabbit is probably the best Beatles homage I've ever seen, even if (or maybe because) they swapped in Nazis for The Beatles.
And now the full list. Italics indicate a movie I particularly enjoyed or found memorable, most of which I describe above.
The Shining - CL, S 1/05
On the Basis of Sex - RR, F 1/11
Shoah: Four Sisters - CN, Su 2/10
Apollo 11 - Apollo, S 3/09
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs - CN, S 3/16
Captive State - Ridge, T 3/19
Captain Marvel - RR, S 3/23
Miss Sharon Jones! - RRHOF, W 3/27
43rd Cleveland International Film Festival - Tower City Cinemas - 6 films
Decade of Fire - S 3/30
Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool - S 3/30
The Show's the Thing: The Legendary Promoters of Rock - S 3/30
Ghost Fleet - Su 3/31
Meeting Gorbachev - W 4/03
Walking on Water - S 4/06 - CMA Gartner
Avengers: Endgame - RR, S 4/26
Amazing Grace - CL, Su 4/27
Gimme Shelter - RRHOF - W 6/05
John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum - Ridge, S 6/08
Rocketman - CPT, T 6/11
Men in Black: International - OKC Cinemark, S 6/29
Spider-Man: Far From Home - RR, M 7/15
Yesterday - WL, S 7/19
Toy Story 4 - RR, S 7/27
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood - RR, F 8/09
Steamboat Bill, Jr. - CN, Su 8/11
Blinded by the Light - RR, F 8/16
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior - CN, Su 8/25
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome - CN, S 8/31
Joker - RR, 10/26
Harold & Maude - CL, S 11/02
Say Amen, Somebody - CN, Su 11/10
JoJo Rabbit - CPT, Su 11/17
Sanjuro - CN, S 11/23
The Irishman - CPT, S 11/30
Growing Up Female - CN, Su 12/01
Methadone - CN, Su 12/01
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker - RR, S 12/28
Movies 2019 = 37 = 31 + 6
January - 2
February - 1
March - 5 + 4
April - 2 + 2
May - 0
June - 4
July - 3
August - 5
September - 0
October - 1
November - 5
December - 3
By Theater
RR - Rocky River AMC - 9
CN - Cinematheque (New) - 9
TCC - Tower City Cinemas - 5
CPT - Capitol Theater - 3
Ridge - Ridge Park AMC - 2
RRHOF - Rock & Roll Hall of Fame - 2
Cedar Lee - 2
Apollo - 1
CMA Gardner - Cleveland Museum of Art (Gartner) - 1
Westlake Regal - 1
Richmond Heights Regal - 1
Out of Town (Oklahoma City) - 1
There were definitely other movies I wanted to see. At one point I told John, the director of the Cinematheque, that I suspected he was intentionally scheduling movies I really wanted to see when I was out of town or otherwise unavailable. At one point there were three weeks in a row with films I really wanted to see during my radio show; one week I actually got the person after me to cover so I could bail out early, but that's not sustainable. I basically never check the Cedar Lee schedule anymore. It's such a pain to get there that absent my long dead Monday Night Movie crew promising socialness and dinner afterward, it's not worth it. I went there once all year. Aside from that though, I find that my interest in mainstream movies is fading even more. There are certainly franchises like Marvel and Star Wars that I don't miss, but that number grows smaller all the time. I didn't do a big Oscar push either for 2019 or late in the year for 2020, because even the nominees often don't interest me much. I'm not sure if I'm getting old or if other interests are just taking my time.
As with previous years, I'm going to call out a few movies I particularly enjoyed here. I already covered the three Marvel movies I saw in 2019, so I won't recap those again.
- After seeing The Shining, I believe I'm down to four of Kubrick's films that I haven't seen yet, two of which are early works. Visually, The Shining is visually stunning, and I enjoyed it greatly, but I didn't find it scary at all in the way that I found the original novel scary. That seems like a critical flaw for a movie that is supposed to be a horror movie.
- Any year with a new film by Quentin Tarantino is at least an interesting film year, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is his best movie in a very long time, and arguably ever if you think it surpassed Pulp Fiction. I loved every minute of it. He managed to largely restrain his impulse to go over the top like he did in his last several movies, and the result was a movie that felt like it flew by despite being quite long. M, however, hated it. She somehow missed that the Manson family was involved when she saw the previews, and she walked out with 30 minutes to go.
- Apollo 11 tells the story of the most famous space mission ever almost solely via archival footage, with no narration. It's incredibly beautiful and movie, and about 10 million times better than last year's shitty First Man. On a side note, this was my first time at the Apollo Theater in Oberlin.
- I had never seen either Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior or Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, so when the Cinematheque showed the full series I made to sure to hit those. They are very good, although the third one is a bit more lighthearted in a way that other three films are not.
- Due to unfortunate coincidences, John Wick 3 - Parabellum I had to see John Wick 3 by myself. It manages to be very pretty and a lot of fun despite making much less sense. I liked the scene with the attack dogs causing mayhem a lot, and I definitely see a sequel.
- I saw two films in the theater for the second time. The Kurosawa samurai film Sanjuro was very good, although the big swordfight I celebrated when I ranked Kurosawa films was not as good as I recalled it. The Buster Keaton classic Steamboat Bill, Jr was still a lot of fun.
- Walking on Water followed Christo as his large scale installation Floating Piers moves from conception to installation. This is one art documentary that worries a lot more about bureaucracy than artistic process. It's weird and enjoyable for art fans.
I also saw a bunch of movies that tied into rock & roll in some way. All of them were fun in different ways.
- The best of these movies was Amazing Grace, which is essentially a film of the recording sessions for the gospel album Amazing Grace by the great Aretha Franklin. They basically filmed it in the middle of the week in a Los Angeles church, but asked the parishoners to come and respond as they would during services. There are a host of gosepl luminaries present as well to observe. You see Mick Jagger in the back of the room losing his shit, and you don't blame him because Aretha is amazing. The film sat around more than 40 years, at first due to technical issues and then because Aretha wasn't interested. After her passing it was released, and it is fantastic. This was my sole film at the Cedar Lee, and the small crowd featured a church group behind me that managed to stay quiet until she hit the title number and they started singing and Amening behind me. I didn't blame them a bit, because I was tempted to myself. If this had come out back in 1972, it would be one of the rock & roll movies everybody had seen at some point.
- Look, I love Aretha, and I'm not taking anything away from her, but my favorite soul singer is Sharon Jones, who I saw many times in concert in front of the Dap-Kings. Somehow, I had missed the documentary about her first, temporarily successful, battle with cancer when it played the theaters, so when the Rock Hall brought back Miss Sharon Jones! M and I were 100% on it. Concert footage Sharon isn't as good as the real thing, but it's all that I get but memories, so I'll take it. The only reason I don't have the soundtrack album is that it's just a rehash of the last several studio albums.
- My friend and longtime co-host Shari and I have now seen three different Rolling Stones films together, the most recent of which and in my opinion the best was Gimme Shelter at the Rock Hall. It's a movie about incredible musicianship and even more incredible incompetent management, which leads to a murder caught on film while the Stones are performing. M and I saw this with Shari and John before we saw the Stones themselves in July, and it was a great warm up.
- Shari and I also went together to see Rocketman, and we both really enjoyed it. I recognized far more Elton John songs that I would have guessed off-hand, and the bizarre Lurhmanesque musical numbers were a ton of fun. It's well worth seeing.
- We had the Stones, so now we have to have The Beatles.Yesterday was penned by the writer of Love Actually and About Time and feels very much like those films in tone. The difference here is that Yesterday has an entire soundtrack of Beatles hits. Jack is a struggling singer-songwriter who is hit by a car. When he wakes up, nobody remembers the Beatles but him, so he passes their songs off as his and shoots to stardom. Will Jack realize he's in love with his childhood sweetheart/old manager in time? Well, duh, it's that kind of movie. Who cares, it's the journey, and the journey is so much fun for Beatles fans. Ed Sheeran is a lot of fun as himself, giving Jack his big break and at one point calling himself Salieri to Jack's Mozart. Kate McKinnon chews the scenery as his manager. Look, the "things people forgot" makes no sense the way it's done (really, nobody has heard of tobacco and the world ended up more or less the same) but I don't care because every time the movie starts to totter the Beatles arrive again. And in case you have to ask, I like the Stones, but the Beatles are better.
- Blinded by the Light happens to be the name of one of my very favorite songs, although I like the popular version by Manfred Mann, not the Springsteen original. I do love Springsteen though, and so the coming of age film presented here is pretty much aimed at me and an assortment of other mostly middle-aged men, a description that matches all four people who were in the theater that night.
- I tend to enjoy documentaries that are about some slice of a thing I love. For years, a staple of my CIFF viewing has been documentaries about various parts of movie productions. This year, they moved over to rock & roll with the documentary The Show's the Thing: The Legendary Promoters of Rock. It turns out that the way bands were booked in America from the start of rock & roll through the late 1990s was actually pretty fascinating, and it gave plenty of excuses to feature some classic sets at famous venues.
Speaking of The Beatles, I don't think it was that great of a movie, but the opening 5 minutes of Jojo Rabbit is probably the best Beatles homage I've ever seen, even if (or maybe because) they swapped in Nazis for The Beatles.
And now the full list. Italics indicate a movie I particularly enjoyed or found memorable, most of which I describe above.
The Shining - CL, S 1/05
On the Basis of Sex - RR, F 1/11
Shoah: Four Sisters - CN, Su 2/10
Apollo 11 - Apollo, S 3/09
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs - CN, S 3/16
Captive State - Ridge, T 3/19
Captain Marvel - RR, S 3/23
Miss Sharon Jones! - RRHOF, W 3/27
43rd Cleveland International Film Festival - Tower City Cinemas - 6 films
Decade of Fire - S 3/30
Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool - S 3/30
The Show's the Thing: The Legendary Promoters of Rock - S 3/30
Ghost Fleet - Su 3/31
Meeting Gorbachev - W 4/03
Walking on Water - S 4/06 - CMA Gartner
Avengers: Endgame - RR, S 4/26
Amazing Grace - CL, Su 4/27
Gimme Shelter - RRHOF - W 6/05
John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum - Ridge, S 6/08
Rocketman - CPT, T 6/11
Men in Black: International - OKC Cinemark, S 6/29
Spider-Man: Far From Home - RR, M 7/15
Yesterday - WL, S 7/19
Toy Story 4 - RR, S 7/27
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood - RR, F 8/09
Steamboat Bill, Jr. - CN, Su 8/11
Blinded by the Light - RR, F 8/16
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior - CN, Su 8/25
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome - CN, S 8/31
Joker - RR, 10/26
Harold & Maude - CL, S 11/02
Say Amen, Somebody - CN, Su 11/10
JoJo Rabbit - CPT, Su 11/17
Sanjuro - CN, S 11/23
The Irishman - CPT, S 11/30
Growing Up Female - CN, Su 12/01
Methadone - CN, Su 12/01
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker - RR, S 12/28
Movies 2019 = 37 = 31 + 6
January - 2
February - 1
March - 5 + 4
April - 2 + 2
May - 0
June - 4
July - 3
August - 5
September - 0
October - 1
November - 5
December - 3
By Theater
RR - Rocky River AMC - 9
CN - Cinematheque (New) - 9
TCC - Tower City Cinemas - 5
CPT - Capitol Theater - 3
Ridge - Ridge Park AMC - 2
RRHOF - Rock & Roll Hall of Fame - 2
Cedar Lee - 2
Apollo - 1
CMA Gardner - Cleveland Museum of Art (Gartner) - 1
Westlake Regal - 1
Richmond Heights Regal - 1
Out of Town (Oklahoma City) - 1