Greetings, loved ones, and welcome back to another edition of Trauma Response! It’s been a minute, but I am back on my couch, typing away to deliver the first in a short series of year-end lists. For this first end-of-the-year list we’re kicking things off with a bang and going into one of my favorite topics in this newsletter: the joy of cinema. Longtime readers probably know that I enjoy talking about movies a lot, so it is only fitting to give you my 2022 cinema year in review as soon as possible. Let’s get to it!
Welcome one and welcome all to the first annual Holdy Awards for Cinema Enterprises! The Holdy Awards for Cinema Enterprises for the year 2022 have been presided over and judged by one of the most auspicious minds of our time, my own, and are brought to you by our friends at Raytheon and British Petroleum. The tallies are in, and according to my Letterboxd account I have watched 70 movies this year (which is probably more than you, no offense), and that includes both new releases as well as older movies and rewatches. As such, The Holdy Awards will not exclude older movies and rewatches from receiving awards, however, they will be awarded in categories separate from new releases. Without further ado…
Best Film I Saw Released Before 2022: Nightcrawler (2014), dir. Dan Gilroy
Nightcrawler is a delicious little psychological thriller starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a funny little man who may or may not be a sociopath, but what’s more important is that he has a dream. What is his dream? A dream to be famous. Famous for what? For documenting car crashes and murders and other terrible acts of bloody violence on the local news. What starts as a job just to make money turns into a quest for infamy and lust for the most gruesome acts imaginable. Nightcrawler is a captivating look at what one can and will do when crushed under the unyielding wheel of capitalism, and the incentives that capitalism gives to those who throw their humanity away to make a buck. Combining two of my favorite things in movies: crazy people and subtle capitalist critique, Nightcrawler was my favorite non-2022 movie of the year.
Best Rewatch of a Film: Rise of, Dawn of, and War for the Planet of the Apes (2011, 2014, 2017), dir. Rupert Wyatt (Rise), Matt Reeves (Dawn, War)
Rewatching movies is something I think many people take for granted, one watch is all you need, right? Wrong! Good movies deserve to be watched more than once, and if it is truly a great movie it needs to be rewatched to comprehend the fullness of its beauty. This is how I feel about the Apes films, having now rewatched them. It was a sunny May afternoon when I suggested to my boyfriend that we watch the reboot trilogy of the original Planet of the Apes movie from 1968, and honestly, it was probably one of the best ideas I’ve ever had. The “new” Apes movies detail the events before, during, and after simple apes across the world became intelligent enough to outrank humans and, for lack of a better phrase, take over the world. It’s impossible to pick just one of the Apes movies to win this award because all three, in tandem, come together to tell the Herculean tale of Caesar the ape (played in motion capture by the legendary Andy Serkis) as he struggles to free his people from the shackles of humanity and toward a brighter future for ape-kind. The Apes films are exquisitely done, blending extensive CGI and motion capture with practical effects and real-world set pieces, and have a certain emotional depth that usually isn’t found in most modern-day blockbuster films (*cough* Marvel *cough*). I hope to revisit the Apes trilogy in all its glory again and look forward to the future of the franchise with Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes coming in 2024.
Best Animated Film: Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, dir. Guillermo del Toro & Mark Gustafson
I haven’t seen many animated movies this year (I’ve only seen two, this and The Bob’s Burgers Movie), but this was a delight! Guillermo del Toro is the master of the bizarre, the whimsical, and, much of the time, the frightening, and Pinocchio is all of those things at one point or another. Set in fascist Italy, del Toro manages to reinvent the myth of Pinocchio through the lens of a little boy experiencing the trials and tribulations of wartime, think “Pinocchio does Pan’s Labyrinth.” With an all-star voice cast including, but not limited to, Ewan McGregor, Christoph Waltz, David Bradley, Tilda Swinton, and Cate Blanchett, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio manages to be bizarre, whimsical, and frightening, but most of all heartfelt, and that’s why it is so amazing.
Most Fun Film of the Year: Bodies Bodies Bodies, dir. Halina Reijn
I’ve already given my review of Bodies Bodies Bodies here, so I won’t belabor my point, but this movie was incredibly enjoyable. While most certainly not for everyone (honestly, probably not even really a movie for people outside of my age bracket), it is a very fun movie that is easy to watch and entertaining while also not just being a crock of mainstream schlock (*cough* Marvel again *cough*). To make a long story short, Bodies Bodies Bodies is Clue (1985) for Gen-Zers (though I still suggest they all watch Clue), and a film that profoundly understands the generation it hopes to highlight as well as make fun of.
Now before I get into the best films of the year (yes, films, I can’t pick just one I’m not the Oscars) I would like to give a quick shoutout to some great films that, sadly, will not be winning any awards tonight, but I still liked anyways:
Crimes of the Future, dir. David Cronenberg
The Batman, dir. Matt Reeves
X and Pearl, dir. Ti West
Nope, dir. Jordan Peele
As well as honorable mentions, I would like to shout out two movies that, sadly, I haven’t seen yet, but I’m sure I would’ve liked:
The Menu, dir. Mark Mylod
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, dir. Rian Johnson
Now onto our big winners…
Best Film of the Year, Third Place: Triangle of Sadness, dir. Ruben Östlund
You’ll perhaps notice a theme with the three films I’m about to praise: they are all a little tricky to describe in plain terms. Nevertheless, I will try my best. Triangle of Sadness is a film about a group of wealthy elites who board a luxury yacht cruise that eventually goes overboard. Of course, it’s about so much more than that, but that’s as simple as I can get it. If I’ve said it before I’ve said it a million times: I’m a bit of a sucker for a satire of the wealthy, and this film is no exception. Director Ruben Östlund understands class struggle and uses it here to create a wide array of characters tethered to and dependent on one another because of this. Triangle of Sadness is one of the funniest films of the year (there’s a 20-minute sequence that I dare not describe other than by saying no one stopped laughing the entire time), but also one of the smartest.
Best Film of the Year, Second Place: Everything Everywhere All at Once, dir. Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert
Everything Everywhere All at Once was one of the first movies I saw in theaters and it was so amazing, so magical and so beautiful that perhaps it spoiled my appetite for many movies afterward. Again, this is a movie that is hard to contain to a short description, but, in essence, it’s a multiverse-hopping, mind-bending, absurdist tale about a mother’s quest to understand her daughter. That’s the best I could do, sorry. It really is a movie you have to see to believe because it is just so grand and magnificent. It’s wacky, and sometimes incredibly so, but for all the people with hotdogs for fingers and bagels with everything on it, it’s a profoundly emotional movie. Everything Everywhere All at Once is grandiose and I’ll admit I was even a little confused about the ideas they were putting forth when I first saw it, but by the end you realize that this movie is not nearly as big in scope or as concerned about heady ideas as it pretends to be. It’s a movie about small moments, intimate things, wrapped in a sci-fi movie of epic proportions.
Best Film of the Year: TÁR, dir. Todd Fields
How I describe TÁR to anyone I tell about it to (no one is ever asking about TÁR because no one even knows it exists) is as follows, “It’s about this legendary composer and orchestra conductor who, like… gets canceled.” This is, of course, a very, very bad description of this movie. TÁR is a movie about a celebrated composer and conductor of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, yes, and she does get canceled, that part happens too, but it’s about so much more than that. If I could amend my description it would be much simpler: it’s about a fall from grace, a slow, painful fall from grace. Of the three Best Films this year, TÁR is the only one I’ve already rewatched because it is simply just that fantastic, it’s a car crash in slow motion all set to an amazing classical music soundtrack and one of the drivers is Cate Blanchett and she’s driving, like, a Lambo or something. There are so many moving pieces that make TÁR, much like the symphonies that Blanchett’s Lydia Tár conducts, and director Todd Fields and Cate Blanchett come together to make them a masterpiece, not only one of the best films of the year but perhaps one of the best films of the last decade.
I wrote earlier this year about how I was a bit disappointed by the movies released during the latter half of this year (Everything Everywhere All at Once excluded). I’ll stand by my feelings even now, and I’ll stand by what I said in that article, but I’m delighted to say that the movies of 2022, as a whole, turned out to be actually very amazing. Films with a more mainstream appeal like Matt Reeve’s The Batman, and more obscure films like Todd Field’s TÁR and all of the other films in between, most of which I’ve mentioned on this list, some of which I’ve probably neglected to mention, they’ve all renewed my faith in cinema going forward. I’ll always be a bit of an alarmist, and next year if I see a string of movies that suck I won’t hesitate to write another article about how cinema is dead, but at least this time I’ll know I can remain optimistic.
Thank you everyone for joining me for the first annual Holdy Awards for Cinema Enterprises. You all get home safe now.
Loved it. Welcome back!❤