My Favorite Movies of 2022

A 2022 movie list? It’s like 6 days into 2023, dummy! Hey, cut me some slack, last year was a busy year. I had my second kid in September (a beautiful little girl named Scott Jr), and I spent most of the year before that preparing for her arrival. This might legitimately be the least amount of movies I’ve seen in a long time. But I tried, you guys.

Heck, I almost didn’t even write this post because I’m so burnt out, but I managed to cobble together a half-assed list of lazy blurbs on the Notes app of my phone; in between carrying my baby five miles a day around my house, and preventing our three-year-old from destroying everything he touches. (I love them)

I realized while compiling this that there were a lot of movies I never got a chance to see, like Tár and Babylon, a pair of three-hour movies that I could probably never make it to the theater to see anyway. I’m not in a rush to see Avatar: The Way of Water, but I think it was 100% worth making it so that I could see this box of cereal on a Walmart end-cap:

I feel like there was a missed opportunity to have Tony the Tiger connecting his Na’vi sex ponytail into the bowl of cereal as his eyes roll back into his head; but hey, James Cameron isn’t perfect.

Sorting Through 2019’s Movies

2019 was a very special year for me.  I tried a new deodorant scent.  I got some new pairs of shoes.  I tasted Chipotle’s carne asada.  I had a kid.  I went to Arizona.  I also saw a bunch of movies!  Several of which seemed to feature evil clowns.  BAD BOY CLOWNS ARE SO HOT RIGHT NOW.

Anyway, here are all the movies I still managed to see this year despite inviting a tiny, pooping human to aggressively move in with my wife and I; put into five super-detailed and well-thought-out levels of quality.

Film School Retrospective: 10-ish Years Later

A recent conversation I had got me reflecting on my film school days, a subject I’ve gone back and forth in my head on as to whether it was a stupid degree or a completely enriching experience?  It could possibly be both?  Either way, I thought I’d spill all the memories and wisdom I had on my four-year odyssey as a film student before 10 more years go by and I forget everything.

So who is this post for, really?  I guess it could be for potential future film school students.  Or for former film school students looking for similarities to their experience.  Or for people just interested in learning about a kind of weird college education.  Or if you’re bored.  I don’t know, I ain’t the boss of your time.  We might only have a couple of years left on this planet, you can choose to do what you want with what you’ve got left.

Here are Haikus for the 100 Movies I Watched In 2016

A lot of people crapped all over 2016.  And justifiably so.  But…  …on a personal level…   …I had a pretty great 2016.

Let me just run down what was so rad about my year:

I got married
I had my most financially successful work year
I traveled to Japan, Hollywood, Wisconsin, and Florida
I was in the studio audience for The Price is Right
I participated on a 48 hour film festival team
The Miami Dolphins made the playoffs
I won the championship in one of my fantasy football leagues
I ate a ton of pizza…  …like *a lot* of pizza

Even though my busy work life sort of hurt the frequency that I post around here, I still kept up the best I could.  And I even did two pretty hefty lists which people seemed to enjoy, the 50 Best Films of the Last 5 Years (in honor of Dino Bone’s 5 year anniversary), and The Most Mediocre Movies of the Last 15 Years.

The only really bad 2016 things that directly affected me were a really painful/annoying root canal, and a really painful/annoying presidential election.

But I think I owe all the good things that happened because last year I evened out all my zen with a 91 haiku 2015 film list.  I gifted it to the cosmos and they aligned a few things nicely in my favor.

So in hopes to get my 2017 in good form from the start, I now present you with haikus for the 100 movies that I watched in 2016, including  a few movies I’ve seen in the last week that I never reviewed (and probably never will because I’m too busy).  I’m also including The Revenant, Anomalisa, and Room because they got wide release in January (sorry, I don’t live in NY or LA) and they didn’t make my list last year.  Shut up!  Enjoy!

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. vs The Men From N.W.A.

I saw two movies again over the past week, and didn’t have much time to write reviews for both of them, so I’m going to put them both into one handy FAQ review to help you decide what to potentially pay to see.  Those two movies are Straight Outta Compton, which chronicles the rise of a hardcore rap group in the 80s and 90s, and then The Man From U.N.C.L.E, which might be the whitest movie I’ve seen this year.

Movie Review: Fantastic Four

I’m gonna be 100% honest with you, I kind of didn’t hate Fantastic Four.  I was relatively entertained for most of it, and I went into it without really having any expectations, good or bad, and came away somewhere in the middle spectrum of entertainment.  “That was alright,” was my expert analysis right after I saw it.  Want another brilliantly insightful, meaty tidbit of dissection from my brain in the parking lot?  “I wasn’t bored.”  Wow, what a ringing endorsement!

Lazy Movie Review:: Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation

Premise:  In addition to having the theme song that I sing really loudly while I take the trash cans to the curb every Thursday night (don’t ask), Mission Impossible also has my favorite animated bomb wick ignition sequences off all time too.  Fun Fact:  No one in this movie uses bomb wicks.  They use computers and stuff.  That’s why spy movies will never be as good as I imagine they were back before I was born.  Why don’t you try to escape a shark tank with a wet box of matches and a deck of cards, you cyber punks!

Who’s More Desperate For Your Laughs: Pixels vs. Trainwreck

I’ve seen two comedies in theaters recently, Pixels and Trainwreck, both with pretty different ‘tudes of comedy style.  Since you probably don’t want to pay $37 TWICE for you and your loved one to see a movie with $10 popcorn and a half-gallon of soda (that’s just the medium size, full gallon upgrade for $0.50 more), I’ll try to answer as many questions from this bold, ominous voice as I can in order to help you pick between the two.

Lazy Movie Review: Ant-Man

Premise:  Paul Rudd as a superhero?!  Say whaaaaaaaaaaaat…?!  He plays Scott Lang, an ex-con who went to prison for hacking money back to investors who got screwed over by his company.  He gets recruited by Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), and his daughter Hope Pym (Evangeline Lilly [Kate from Lost]) to steal back the technology Pym tried to hide from his business partner because it’s too powerful and will destroy the world, kind of.  The explosions are apt.

Lazy Movie Review: Terminator Genisys

Premise:  I saw this movie two weeks ago and haven’t had much time to write anything about it until now, but that has kind of confined my memory to basically remember it being a rehash of the first Terminator‘s plot, but then with more robots and stuff later on.  Also, cell phone app updates are bad and could lead to a nuclear wasteland where the survivors are being imprisoned by tyrannical robot overlords.  Remember that the next time you’re asked to update Angry Birds Seasons.