Top Movies of 2022 - Honorable Mentions and Extras

Okay, the Top 15 list is done, but there's a ton of other things to talk about:

Honorable Mentions:

Elvis, dir. Buz Lurhmann

Musical biopics are about as worn a genre of film as I can imagine in 2022, so bravo to one that still has life and energy. Austin Butler’s Elvis was the single greatest acting performance I saw last year. He felt immense, a superstar reborn. Seeing this Elvis perform "Suspicious Minds" halfway through this movie was the first time I actually understood why my Grandma is so crazy about Elvis guy. Any other divine or superhero metaphors I could use in my description were taken first by Baz Lurhmann’s very blunt script. (But whoever said bluntness was a negative?) However, everything great about Butler was matched by the bizarre choices made for Tom Hank’s Tom Parker, which was maybe the single worst performance of last year. He gave us a waddling Batman villain meets the Emperor from Star Wars with an accent less accurate to Dutch than Goldmember. And those two together really is what makes Elvis work, it's as brilliant as it is obvious and stupid.

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, dir. Jane Schoenburn

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is the kind of horror movie that will offend and insult people who expect the movie to end with a demon girl climbing out of a computer screen in a big jump scare. Nothing that directly spooky ever happens, or needs to. Instead, World's Fair is a slow burn of increasingly disturbing vibes. As Casey (Anna Cobb) live streams her experiences with The World’s Fair, a creepypasta art collective, she performs the slow loss of self-control, while actually losing control of performance. There are not monsters online can steal our bodies and souls, but there are people out there who can steal our narratives. Older manipulators, forcing people into relationships perhaps entirely imagined. That's much more frightening than just a ghost and ghoul.

The Menu, dir. Mark Mylod

Pig in 2021 was not kind to the high-class food establishment. But it might as well have been a glowing foodie blog compared to how The Menu treats that world. Nicolas Cage could only stare on in disgust at the loveless, over-produced expensive garbage on his table. The Menu is so furious at the extravagant waste that the upper class indulges in, it wants to burn the world down. There is a brilliant scene in The Menu where our murderous head chef Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) forces his most pretentious fan, Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) into the kitchen. Tyler has a sophisticated pallet, he knows everything about Slowik’s methods, he even can forgive the joke of killing the patrons. But Slowik wants him to cook for him, to be more than just a consumer, to create something. The result is the most devastating ending for a person in a movie in 2022.

Prey, dir. Dan Trachtenberg

Prey was one of the best blockbusters of 2022 and should have been on the big screen to be a solid box office hit. But instead I had to watch Prey at home on Hulu. An idea like Comanches vs Aliens deserves a big triumphant screen! Prey is a clever and inventive action movie. Not a single piece of the script buffalo is wasted when every set-up is used against the space hunter. I was cheering on my couch when Naru (Amber Midthunder) tricked the Predator into chopping off his own arm.

The Batman, dir. Matt Reeves

No, the new Matt Reeves/Robert Pattinson Batman reboot is not the best Batman movie I’ve ever seen. It is not even the best Batman Year 1 movie, that honor goes to Batman Begins or Mask of the Phantasm. But still, The Batman was the best superhero film of 2022. It kept the more miserable tendencies of the Snyderverse at bay, presenting a gritty and gothic superhero, but still one with a kick-ass car chase scene. Plus they played a Nirvana song and Collin Farrell’s Penguin was great. Importantly, I love that Batman got to some plain old-fashioned hero stuff at the end. Remember when superheroes saved people?

The Northman, dir. Robert Eggers

The most unfortunate flop of 2022. But maybe The Northman was always doomed. Robert Eggers was not making this movie for modern audiences. No, The Northman is a Viking movie made with Viking values in mind. This is a movie about honor, the burden of fate, the glory of bloodlines, and being a damn awesome warrior with a chest so ripped you don’t have a six-pack, you have a ten-pack. The Northman is about getting stoned in a filthy cave and having a psychedelic vision quest with a very hammy Willem Dafoe. Or later fighting what is effectively a Dark Souls boss. If you did not cheer when the lightning bolt crashed across the screen and you saw that Odin had appeared to save the day, you were the wrong audience. Also, this movie ends on a naked fight in an erupting volcano, and no other movie in 2022 was that gloriously metal.

Bones and All, dir. Luca Guadagnino

After my October project all about vampire movies, I'm a big sucker for horror romances. Especially when Bones and All is basically vampires, I'll fight you on this point. Maybe they're just cannibals, but they also have an underground society of social outsiders wandering the countryside dressing like the coolest hipsters in a thrift shop. Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet are great leads, turning eating people into as much of a liberation road trip as say, Nomadland. Mark Rylance's Sully is the most elaborate villain of the year. Maybe he has one quirk too many (fisherman's costume, Indian affections, speaking in the third person, freaky hair braid). He's the best Stephen King villain that Stephen King has never written.

X

See Pearl, already discussed.

Fire of Love, dir. Sara Dosa

How many great romance documentaries have there been in the past? (Seriously, let me know, I'll watch them.) Fire of Love is a documentary about Katia and Maurice Krafft, a married couple of French volcanologists who became public intellectuals and filmmakers in their quest to study the Earth's most violent forces. I do not know about anybody else, but the idea of living a life wandering the world to climb mountains together with your spouse sounds like a dream, even if a volcano is almost killing you constantly (and indeed, will get our heroes in 1991). Fire of Love uses tons of their footage, which became the Krafft's "children" in a way, their immortal legacy, which we still get to enjoy and admire thirty years later.

Jackass Forever

After a decade break, it turns out I just really love all these dumbasses. Never has doing reckless stupid shit felt so wholesome. Two dudes flatten their junk between panes of glass and then play ping pong on the crushed genitals. That's cinema to me.

Best Performances of 2022:

Tang Wei as Song Seo-rae in Decision to Leave

Mia Goth as Pearl in Pearl and X

Ke Huy Quan as Waymond Wang in Everything Everywhere All at Once

Margot Robbie as Beautiful Early 20th Century Lady in Babylon and Amsterdam

Austin Butler as Elvis Presley in Elvis

Cate Blachett as Lydia Tár in Tár

Ram Charan & N. T. Rama Rao Jr. as Raju & Bheem in RRR

Lee Pace as Greg in Bodies Bodies Bodies

Kristen Stewart as Timlin in Crimes of the Future

Claire Foy as Solome Friesen in Women Talking

Mark Rylance as Sully in Bones and All

Robert Pattinson as The Batman in The Batman

Christopher Abbott as Kevin in On the Count of Three

Rebecca Hall as Margaret in Resurrection

Chris Hemsworth as Steve Abnesti in Spiderhead

Dishonorable Mentions:

Men, dir. Alex Garland

Easily the worst ending to any movie of 2022. Men was a great folk horror movie for 90% of its running time. With a few changes, it could have been a more respectable remake of Rawhead Rex. Instead its conclusion was, despite incredible gore, just impossibly lame. Men ended up saying next to nothing about how men interact with women. It offered so little of value despite its ambition, it may have had anti-value, people understand the problems less well thanks to this movie existing. Ultimately, it just felt like Alex Garland feeling sorry for himself and his gender, over-universalizing the issue of abuse. Women Talking means this movie does not really need to exist, luckily.

White Noise, dir. Noah Bambauch

Noah Bambauch's incoherent adaptation of a Don DiLillo book was another example of Netflix just letting anything happen on their platform, no quality control. White Noise is not a horrendous movie for most its runtime. It even has a promising interlude which basically becomes a National Lampoon's Covid-19 Family Vacation. Then it violently lurches back to being about rich comfortable people being unsatisfied with Late Capitalism. Probably worst of all, White Noise seems to conclude with the outrageous statement of "no, all the societal rot is good actually because we're rich and fat, we can dance in the aisles of the supermarket and consume happily". What a mess.

Morbius, dir. Éric Rochant

No movie has ever less deserved its memetic status. Beyond the jokes, Moribus is the least interesting movie I saw in 2022. Kids today deserve a better class of meme movie.

Amsterdam, dir. David O. Russell

Margot Robbie needed better movies in 2022. She really does go all-out in every performance. If anybody should watch themselves in a theater and be enraptured by their own star power, it is her. (I've seen Robbie perform this exact scene twice.) Anyway, Margot Robbie's charisma and beauty aside, Amsterdam lands nothing of its ambitions. The mystery plot has no mystery, the comedy isn't funny, the characters are nostalgic for moments in their lives we do not get to see, the final reveal is painfully obvious, and Christian Bale's Jewish accent sounds like an Adam Sandler character half the time. Amsterdam had everything a great movie needed and completely failed. 

At least Margot Robbie got to be in Babylon, which was also very flawed, but has a great first hour. Amsterdam has nothing.

Moonfall, dir. Roland Emmerich

Black Panther 2 was the biggest disappointment of the year since I expected a great movie. But sometimes you can be disappointed just by expecting a fun movie. Moonfall is the latest Roland Emmerich disaster, and I've enjoyed most of his planet-annihilating schlock. Hell, I even like the Emmerich rip-offs. (The Core is a great movie, Stanley Tucci has an amazing wig!) And even as somebody with tolerance for this kind of trash, Moonfall crashed harder than its celestial premise. It is the worst one of these by many miles. In fact, it's precisely 238,900 miles, the distance from the Earth to the Moon. 

How do you make a movie about the Moon crashing into the Earth unfun? How is Emmerich still sticking to his handful of clichés over a decade after they all started to feel like self-parody in his 2012? I know moons are heavy things to carry around, but how come Geostorm starring Gerard Butler felt like effortless cheese and Moonfall feels like a lumbering slog?

Wildly Inaccurate Predictions for Best Movies of 2023:

15. Suzume, dir. Makoto Shinkai - It was on last year's predictions, and did not come out in the US, so welcome back!

14. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Part One), dir. Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, & Justin K. Thompson - See above, did not release anywhere in 2022.

13. The Killers of the Flower Moon, dir. Martin Scorsese - See above. Yeah, this one too.

12. Beau Is Afraid, dir. Ari Aster - See above. This one too! This has changed its title from "Disappointment Blvd" and now has a trailer. I have even less of an idea what it is going to be about having seen that trailer.

11. Oppenheimer, dir. Christopher Nolan

10. Barbie, dir. Greta Gerwig

9. Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning (Part 1) dir. Christopher McQuarrie - Okay, maybe I am hyped a bit for Tom Cruise's latest stupid stunts.

8. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3, dir. James Gunn - I know I said I was done with the MCU, but okay, you get ONE MORE CHANCE! ONE MORE!

7. Nimona, dir. Nick Bruno & Troy Quane

6. Napoleon, dir. Ridley Scott

5. Megalopolis, dir. Francis Ford Coppola

4. How Do You Live?, dir Hayao Miyazaki

3. Magic Mike's Last Dance, dir. Steven Soderbergh - I am very hyped to finally have an excuse to watch the Magic Mike (now) trilogy.

2. Dune: Part 2, dir. Denis Villeneuve - DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUNE!!!!!

1. Skinamarink, dir. Kyle Edward Ball - I'm cheating. I've seen this movie already and it is one of the most terrifying movies I've ever seen. It was so scary, it was unpleasant. We can be 100% certain this is making the 2023 Top 15.

Top Movie of 2022: No. 1 - Everything Everywhere All at Once

1. Everything Everywhere All at Once, dir. Daniels

The least surprising surprise. I mean, come on! What choice did I have? This was inevitable. I left that theater last March thinking "case closed, that's the best movie of 2022". Everybody I've told about Everything Everywhere All at Once watched this movie and also said "yup, that's obviously the best movie of the year and if you write a Top 15 list it will be boring because the winner is so obvious, Eric". (I promise they did say this.) I'm almost left with little more to say. This movie has everything, as promised. Everything everywhere for two hours and twenty minutes.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is an enormous amount of movie with a lot of tones. Avatar 2 is an hour longer and has far, far less movie in it than this one. Everything Everywhere is an action-packed extravaganza of SciFi reality-bending power, it could be this generation's The Matrix. But beyond that is wonderfully silly, imaginative, and really clever. What seem like one-off gags turn out to be incredibly important. No matter how ridiculous the premise, nothing is thrown away like a Family Guy cutaway gag. Everything Everywhere loves every bizarre part of itself and insists that 100% of its ideas reach a cathartic end in a sometimes exhausting obsession.

However, I believe you can reedit Everything Everywhere All at Once into a much more mundane movie. Because this is a mutliverse epic (sorry Doctor Strange, you got badly out-shown in 2022) it would not even be too difficult to splice out all the fantastic elements and the other realities to just about a forty minute interpersonal drama. At the very core of Everything Everywhere is a family tearing itself apart and then during one very hectic day, finding an ability to communicate again. You could read all the amazing elements as just a symptom of Evelyn (the great Michelle Yeoh)'s boredom or emotional dissatisfaction. Or maybe the multiverse distractions are a metaphor for undiagnosed ADHD, since she cannot focus on her life right now. That is, until her life explodes in a million ways even without scenes of martial arts sodomy.

Personally, waiting on the Everything Everywhere All at Once Topher Grace cut.

Really what Everything Everywhere All at Once is about is a couple of first-generation Chinese immigrants whose life has become completely swamped by debts, failed ambitions, annoying customers, and conservative hang-ups. Just a few minutes in Evelyn's life feels as hectic and anxiety-inducing as Uncut Gems. Her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan in a glorious return) is a small, quiet man unable to speak up. Their daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) is trying to connect back to the family but her mother refuses to acknowledge her girlfriend, Becky (Tallie Medel). Then there's Gong Gong (the great James Hong), the elderly grandfather who needs to be wheeled around and just happens to be visiting at the most inconvenient time possible. 

Still, none of the other universes and martial arts nonsense are unnecessary, Waymond gets his greatest character moment away from what we can consider 'Our Universe'. The dozen or so alternate movies playing in this have their own importance and care given to them. But Everything Everywhere is never about anything other than this battle to accept each other. To let down whatever terrible voice in our head pushes our loved ones away and instead forces into a role we hate, such as a mother who can only nag her daughter about her weight.

I did consider doing a double Number One, with Everything Everywhere All at Once and Turning Red both sharing the top spot. It is incredible that we have two movies with so many similar themes, both in the Top 3, both about Chinese mothers and daughters, both about accepting queerness (either subtextually or textually) and weirdness and freedom, and both released in March 2022. This generational split in that community has clearly been a source of a lot of pain, even as it is such a muse. It meant a lot to half of the directing duo, who poured his own emotions into this project. It means a lot to me, because my near-boomer parents can be ignorant idiots sometimes, and I'm not Chinese and never will be. I love how this real trauma can be felt cinematically in fantastical metaphors. Maybe you're a mom turned into a kaiju red panda destroying Toronto, maybe you're a daughter whose trauma has transformed you into a super cool Final Fantasy villain and now will annihilate reality with a nihilism bagel.

I had a sense many years ago that the directing duo known as Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) were bound for greatness years ago when I saw their short film, Interesting Ball. That feels now like something of a dress rehearsal for what they would achieve in Everything Everywhere All at Once. There is this wonderful affect in that twelve-minute short, where we see many different surreal stories all happening... at once, and while none are alike, they all come together in this beautiful collage. The ball bounces around, creating impossible and disgusting yet wonderful things, and has an almost cosmic effect of shaking the universe down. Interesting Ball is revolution of all standards, embracing the way grossness can tie us all together in childlike delight. Where we are free to be anything, be that a young woman on a date with an older man, or sucked up an asshole to be one with our best friend soulmate.

Besides all that, Interesting Ball is a very impressive work of editing. Everything Everywhere All at Once is repeating that feat, since by the third act of this movie, its various plotlines have splintered into what should be an incoherent mass. Evelyn has in just one day, seen her life transform from merely being an overwhelmed laundromat owner to now the hero of all reality. And while fighting for the entire multiverse, she's begun to connect with her various other selves across time and space. This includes a famous movie star in a smoke-filled alley straight out of Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love, or a hibachi chef trying to reconnect her co-worker with Raccacoonie (played by Randy Newman!), a raccoon that lives on his head.

It takes real skill to sketch together a film that can connect low-stakes personal drama, Silver Age SciFi nonsense, one of the most acclaimed movies of the 20th century, a misremembered plot to a Disney movie, and Hot Dog Fingers without the production collapsing. Instead, all the stories progress at once to a beautiful pay-off. Maybe the most powerful scene in cinema in 2022 was in Everything Everywhere, with two rocks with googly eyes talking to each other with subtitles. It is such a joke of a premise, yet it is emotional cornerstone of this entire movie. Little dumbass rocks will made me cry.

So yeah, Everything Everywhere All at Once is the most obvious Movie of the Year pick I've had in all the years I've done this. It achieves everything you could want out of cinema without compromise, without dumbing it down, fearlessly. I do not envy Daniels for ever having to follow up a work like this. Because if made Everything Everywhere, I would just retire. What  more do you need to say after this? Everything Everywhere is already in your one masterpiece movie.

Top Movies of 2022: No. 2 - The Worst Person in the World

2. The Worst Person in the World, dir. Joachim Trier

A movie that topped many 2021 Best Of lists, The Worst Person in the World did not release in the US until February. Sorry, Norway, I'm the last person in the world to talk about how great The Worst Person in the World is.

The Worst Person in the World is a coming-of-age drama, only does anybody ever come of age anymore? Adolescent angst in our modern times seems to stretch forever. Our heroine, Julie (Renate Reinsve) is quickly running out of her twenties and coming to an awful realization: that first digit of her age turning over is not going to suddenly shower her life with meaning and happiness. She never really settled on a degree in college, never found a husband, and never accomplished much of anything in the way of a career. Ultimately though, it is decisions themselves that she is terrified of. Julie goes through two relationships in her movie with two men that love her and she loves back. But when the moment comes to take the next step, to have her life defined by whatever this is, she runs away. "I feel like a spectator in my own life. Like I'm playing a supporting role...", she tells her older cartoonist boyfriend, Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie).

That is a telling line, speaking of Julie's anxieties and fears, while ironically making a decision that will only exasperate them. But it is also a load of bullshit. The truth is, there's another man, Elivind (Herbert Nordrum), a younger, less serious person. With Elivind, she will be free of a life of older married friends and the expectation to fill her body with children. She can waste more time, do some mushrooms, have mindless fun and screw around. There's a freedom in being nobody with no goals, no tasks, just a bookshop job and a hot doofus at home. The Worst Person in the World is different from so many other romantic comedies where falling in love solves everything. Actually, in real life, falling in love might solve nothing at all. Julie comes dangerously close to an irreversible life choice with Elivind, and then at the last minute, she's given one final escape. Nothing achieved, yet, maybe not nothing learned.

The title is interesting. Julie is by no means a terrible person. Sure, she cheats on Aksel and probably is using Elivind. Sure she's a layabout in Oslo refusing to pursue her many talents. (She writes a feminist piece on oral sex that gets published online and is very successful, then never publishes anything again.) She crashes a wedding just for fun and gets into an argument with a loud lady just to troll her. This is never arch-villainy. "The Worst Person in the World" is this dramatic statement, which feels like a young person's view of themselves. It speaks to a time when your ego is so fragile you must either be one hyperbole or another. Julie never speaks these words out loud and is never called this, but she's definitely feeling it.

But The Worst Person in the World is also about not feeling that way. About how life is not time wasted or decisions not taken, but simply the moments we've had. There's brutal existential questions that are never quite answered. However, maybe they just do not matter anymore. Maybe growing up is not the responsibilities we take or reject, it is just learning to love ourselves. Aksel, despite having ten years on Julie, seems like he never really found these answers, and in a heartbreaking turn, it may be too late for him.

The standout thing about The Worst Person in the World is its soundtrack. This feels like the kind of cool selections of old Seventies pop hits that would have decorated an indie hit back in the 2000s. The needle drops are full of guys like Art Garfunkle and Harry Nilsson. I do not think this is the kind of soundtrack that Julie would pick her own life, this sort of ultra-hipster deep-cut cred feels more like stuff that would be in Aksel's record collection. But every song hits just right, and it rules, I fell badly in love with the ending song, which is absolutely perfect for this movie's message. The Worst Person in the World's soundtrack is something that a kid could find and decide to make their entire personality for three years. It is as dangerous as Garden State or Juno. (Or in my case, Drive.) All these sensitive men with feelings gives the movie an interesting texture. It's as iconic as the warm summery air of Oslo's modernist landscape which dominates so much of the frame.

I'm thirty-two now. The Worst Person in the World speaks a lot to me at the time of writing. (Forgive me, I usually only get introspective with I hit Movie of the Year.) I'm not married, have no kids. I never found the important job or the big platform that ever turned this into a brand or even paid a single bill. I should feel terrible, like I let an eighth of my life pass by since college without real success. The Worst Person in the World makes me feel better. Because fuck it, I did plenty of cool things in my Twenties, I'm gonna do more cool things in my Thirties. I like myself, I think I'm better at what I do now than I was last year, and life is not about some triumph you win ten minutes before the end credits.

Top Movies of 2022: No. 3 - Turning Red

3. Turning Red, dir. Domee Shi

In March 2022 two movies came out with very similar premises. They were both about conservative Chinese mothers forced to confront the non-traditional life choices of their daughters but finding acceptance with own inner weirdness. One of those was Turning Red, our subject for today, and the other was some... silly movie about bagels or googly eyes or something. I can't really remember the title of that one, probably won't be important. Certainly will not be circling back to that thing at all.

I also do need to comment on Disney's brilliant strategy of releasing their best movies only to streaming. Turning Red was a Disney+ exclusive, and Prey was dumped to Hulu because of a previous deal with HBO Max. I'm glad both of these movies found their audiences, but as somebody who likes theaters and still thinks that's best way to watch anything, it's frustrating. Turning Red was the third Pixar movie in a row to never see the inside of a cineplex, certainly a dramatic reversal of fortune for the storied award-winning studio. Their previous movie, Luca was a fun movie about kids being kids and finding themselves in the world and causing trouble. Turning Red is the same kind of movie, only with middle school girls in Toronto. This is one of most joyful movies of the year. It should have been bigger.

Speaking of kids causing trouble, Turning Red had a bit of a backlash this year. All that was one of those stark reminders that many grown adults in the world refuse to believe that children actually are people that make choices. We're in the midst of one of the largest political and media assaults on a group of people I have ever experienced in my life, an all-out war against trans youths. This bigotry is so barbaric that none of us will be able to explain it to future generations when they rightfully wonder what the Hell we were thinking. Turning Red need not be a metaphor for anything, just the text was too taboo for some. And all Mei (Rosalie Chiang) wants to do in Turning Red is sometimes be a big fluffy red panda sometimes while her mom, Ming (Sandra Oh) forbids it. How dare a movie say kids should be themselves and find identities outside her family unit?

How dare a movie acknowledge that menstruation... exists? I'm sorry I'm so being so negative so far. I really like this movie and everything it stands for. Honestly most of the adults who dislike it seem like they've yet to grow up themselves in many ways.

Now admittedly, Turning Red is severe catnip for me specifically. Red pandas rule. Director Domee Shi has spoken directly about how her inspirations for Turning Red were Sailor Moon and Ranma 1/2. You can see the anime influence in the expressiveness of the faces, which do these huge cartoon reactions. Mei and her friends are all color-coordinated like the Sailor Scouts and often do dramatic sentai poses. Turning Red is set in 2002, right when millennials, such as yours truly, would have been discovering these exact anime show. That includes the director who was born in 1989 and like Mei, grew up in Toronto. It is pretty weird to be old enough now that my middle school can days goldmines for nostalgia. But I'm not complaining. The movie's climax references Mamoru Hosoda's The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, right before becoming a kaiju movie. It is hitting all my weaknesses at once, how do I fight back?

Also, Turning Red proves that more movies need a Double Jump.

I also really loved Turning Red's cast. Mei's friend group all have their own unique silhouettes and energies. Abby (Hyein Park) is this loud angry short king, while Priya (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) is more goth-y reserved, yet all while they show emotion differently, it all reads clearly. Who wouldn't love seeing their emotions of seeing their favorite boy band in concert? I love that Mei has a heroic gang of super aunts in her extended family that can save the day. I love that Turning Red feels authentic to a kind of cultural experience that is not just a generic Disney plot copy-pasted but now with soup dumplings. All this pressure to be perfect, that crushing fear even Ming feels when her own mother gets involved, that feels very specific to a real time and place and culture.

Most of all, I love that Turning Red is a movie that dares imagine that there can be growth and acceptance. An increasingly bold statement in 2022, when people kept choosing ignorance as a weapon instead.

Top Movies of 2022: No. 4 - RRR

4. RRR, dir. S. S. Rajamouli

I had a really bad January. The week of my birthday we found out about a sudden, shocking family tragedy and we had to rush across the country. That week sucked. There was a lot of pain, a lot of guilt, a lot of stress. Anyway, I only dwell on all that to say that only movie from 2022 really cheered me up. There were a lot of fun movies, a lot of great vibes, a lot of great friendships, but the most loving and positive experience I could think of to get me out of my funk was "Do you know Naatu?" That put a smile on my face two sizes too big for my head. My grinning cheeks were out past my ears.

I'm very happy that an Indian movie has finally caught on in the West. Years ago, I was trying to tell anybody who would listen about this heroic epic called Baahubali, a duology of fantasy movies also directed by S. S. Rajamouli. I was yelling "Baahubali" at total strangers around town, hoping anybody would listen. Please watch Baahubali, and then consider many other great Indian movies that RRR could lead you to. You can watch Lagaan, another movie about heroic colonial subjects defeating British twits, this time in a game of cricket. Or if you want another awesome bromance, there's always, Sholay, "The Greatest Story Ever Told!", featuring a scene of two bros having fun riding through the country. (I'm obsessed with that sequence, it's so precious.)

So why did RRR catch on but not Baahubali or War (2019) or Enthiran? I do not know. RRR is a remarkably big movie, the most expensive one ever made in India. Maybe those other movies were just too fantastic to be taken seriously, or not fantastic enough to stand-out. RRR hits that Goldilocks Point of being just amazing enough that it is unlike any blockbuster from around the world, yet is not laughably bizarre. The subject matter helps too. Despising British imperialism is practically a universal language thanks to their centuries of global pillaging. A historically inaccurate over-the-top fantasy of preposterous violence against stuck-up English villains? If you grew up watching Roland Emmerich's The Patriot, you're ready for RRR. Maybe also in an age where the MCU is the dominant form of cinema, RRR had an opening. Where the MCU is sarcastic and self-conscious, RRR is nothing but sincere. Gloriously, shamelessly sincere.

Also, it could be that RRR is just a great movie. This is a three hour monstrosity that needs all three hours. RRR has more movie in it than any other movie of 2022. I thought this was wrapping up and going to end on a downer, before it suddenly launched a whole second act. There's incredible action sequences. There's our two central bros, Bheem (N. T. Rama Rao Jr.) and Raju (Ram Charan), effectively falling in love during the greatest hand catch scene in film history under a burning bridge to save a kid. We then shift to a tragic structure where these two superpowered heroes hide themselves in their various secret identities, unwittingly hunting each other. There's a scene of public torture so defiant and dramatic, it might as well be Christ on the Mount. Then one guy becomes an avatar of the god Vishnu. 

And then there's CG wild animals. 

And then there's a piggy back fight scene.

I could go on. There are many wonders yet to describe.

Now to be a downer, there is an undercurrent in RRR that left me frankly disturbed. I loved the achingly hot bromance made so innocently of any possible queer subtext. I loved the complete disinterest in historical accuracy (the British Empire ruled Brazil in this universe). However, RRR is not all simple fun as it seems. This is also a work of nationalist myth-making which gets especially unpleasant during the end credits music number. That scene was this martial dance sequence featuring several heroes of India, or more specifically, Hindu independence. Raju and Bheem liberate Inida, but you must wonder liberate for who? This is a very diverse and complex country that many powers would like to flatten down. The fact that Bheem is a little too proud when he reveals his Muslim garb is only a disguise worries me. Especially when right now the Modi government is at war with its own Muslim citizens.

And I do not really have a solution there. I'd love to enjoy more Indian cultural products, but the darker turn that country is taking is going to keep clouding its future, even in cinema. In the meantime, I cannot really be too much of a buzzkill for RRR. Because in the end, we still do have Naatu. It is not too late to turn that into a huge Tik Tok phenomena. I want to Naatu at the next wedding I attend.