2024/12/26
Twenty-five years ago, a friend and I were discussing our earliest memories in his kitchen while eating something, probably beef burgers or heaping fistfuls of chocolate chips or the immortal taco-pizza. After I recounted how my father yelled at everyone when my mom and cousin were just trying to decorate our Christmas tree in late '83, he -- as though we were competing in a feverish exchange of potentially tragicomic one-upmanship -- related how his very first memory was that of his drunken father breaking a wooden chair over his mother's back.
Nearly an hour later (or fifty-four minutes later, for those who reckon time from the minute when my friend ejected me from his house), I finally stopped laughing and reflected on the traumatic aspect of my friend's early memory, then started laughing for another ten minutes, because Todd Solondz couldn't contrive anything as hilariously horrible as that precious first memory of an alcoholic Irishman smashing the wooden chair of comedy over the punchline of a borderline retarded Italian woman's silly clown back.
Notwithstanding a shared theatrical screening of American Psycho and a few more meals together, we saw gradually less of one another after that. He went off to college and I relocated to the midwest to do nothing of any significance. As the years wore on, I came to regret some of my choices -- specifically, that I spent so much time with someone who was less of a friend and more of a passive-aggressive parasite. Then more years wore on and I regretted not watching Shunji Iwai's movies during those years that wore on, which was nuts. However, I'll never forget his magical memory of spousal abuse, or that time when he puked all over my mom's cat and sofa.
For a few days some weeks ago, common idiots on social media expressed their routine outrage over superannuated goyrag Time's horrendous candidates for their Person Man of the Year:
As one can clearly observe, their candidates are five obnoxious, glaring political puppets, an autistic billionaire/man-child, one human thumb who retarded himself with marijuana or equine anodynes or something, a genocidal tyrant, and Kate Middleton. If I were a pettier, less patient man who couldn't wait to exploit the context of my friend's tragic memory, I would probably contrive some joke in which Netanyahu is the kind of alcoholic father who smashes chairs like Harris/Powell/Trump/Navalnaya/Sheinbaum over the backs of the public while Joe Rogan and Elon Musk comment ambivalently on that in a skunky miasma, and Kate Middleton pumps out one more kid who will hate his virtue-signalling dad and his virtue-signalling dad's godawful, clearly cowardly hair when he's a teenager, but it's too early for that.
Obviously, there's only one Man of my Year: Shunji Iwai. I could've used a template in the style of Time's ugly, boring, tired covers, but instead I elected to apply a more interesting typeface to demonstrate my adoration for this hero weirdly rendered by Grok, because a hundred people have already posted mockups of the cover that feature Daniel Penny or Luigi Mangione or Charlie XVX, or whatever they call that ugly whore. As he was last year, Iwai is my single most reliable source of cinematic pleasure, but I'll get to all that later this week. Oh, and I think that they decided to call Trump the man or person of the year or something, but I don't read, much less pay to read obnoxious trash peddled to moribund, sociopolitically and socioculturally mentally handicapped Boomers and early Xers, so I wouldn't know.
In the interest of forestalling the numerous digusting psychosomatic symptoms that I experience when I'm not reviewing movies, I didn't merely paragraph the best and worst movies that I've seen in the past year, but ALL of the movies heretofore unseen during the past year, in alphabetical order. Some of these are new, others are old, and nearly all of them are in some way interesting.
Last year, I reviewed all of the best flicks that I'd seen, then the worst. This year, starting today, right now, over the course of a working week, I'll commence my conspectus in the sewer known as The Worst, then climb up to a figurative landfill to feast on a Trash Banquet, after which I'll engorgedly reflect on some Laudable Failures before proceeding to explain why you could do worse than to watch some movies that received my Honorable Mentions, before ascending to a realm of laudatory excellence known as The Best. In case you were wondering, many of my positive reviews exalt movies that were written/cast/directed/edited/publicized/composed/dry cleaned/produced/diapered/hosted/etc. by Shunji Iwai, so if you don't like those, you may want to do the right thing and close this tab immediately before killing yourself. Thank you. Good bye.
To make this annual event even more exciting, color commentary on selected features will be supplied by my new mascot, Allen the Alligator. Allen's distinctly crocodilian perspective and values will provide a counterpoint to my purely true and right opinions, and also satisfy that ever-imperative quota for diversity that I'm required to fulfill, because god knows that I won't be employing blacks, Indians, or Jews in that, or any capacity, in part because I'm too poor to pay them.
Are you ready? Yes, I'm starting now! No? Okay, go take a shit, grab a snack, pour some milkie in your sippy-cup, and strap your dumb ass in for the best capsule reviews that you'll read all year.
© 2024 Robert Buchanan