My Favorite Things of 2022 (pt. I)
Every year around this time I have one question: how in the world did “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music become a Christmas song? It’s not even the holidays when the song happens in the show — it’s just a rain storm!
That said, the next question I have is: what were my favorite things from this year?
It’s a loaded question, and I usually put out some form of list for my favorite movies, TV, and music in various places (maybe they’ll end up here this year, we’ll see) so I don’t really want to step on their toes. Instead, I want to use this space to call out my personal favorite moments from pop-culture this year (knowing I still have more to watch/listen/play from 2022).
It should go without saying, SPOILER WARNER for anything I list
Also this is going to be long, so I’m splitting it into parts. This is part 1
MOVIES
The Batman: The Batmobile Reveal
I’ll start with something early in the year. I had next to no high expectations for Matt Reeves’ The Batman [dir. Matt Reeves]. Did we really need another Batman movie so soon? Did they really use a Nirvana song in the trailer? Does it actually have to be 3 hours?
It turns out the answer to all three of those was a resounding “yes”. Reeves’ take on Batman is the most “World’s Greatest Detective” version of the character since the great animated series from the ’90s. The Nirvana song, while seeming following a bad/tired trend of using famous songs to set the mood in movie trailers turned out to be a tease for the same song being used as an incredible needle drop near the beginning and end of the film, perfectly encapsulating how this Bruce Wayne sees Gotham and his place in it.
As for the runtime? The Batman managed to use every second of it, imbuing this Gotham with so much life and depth and character. It also allowed the film to move deliberately rather than rush from moment to moment, letting it build to its various crescendos including my favorite when, after a loud and sudden gunfight, this happens:
The batmobile engine roars, it screeches, and every character from Catwoman to The Penguin to Gordon stare with a mix of awe and terror. It’s our first time seeing the vehicle in action and it lets us know this fight is about to go on the move. What follows is a thrilling white-knuckle car chase through the rain that feels genuinely dangerous to watch. I stop breathing every time I watch it, and giving us enough time to truly understand how momentus this reveal is to the story is near perfection.
Fresh: The 45-Minutes-In Credits
Among the many direct-to-streamer movies this year Fresh [dir. Mimi Cave] was definitely one of the most fun. The ads for it definitely let me know it would be twisted, and certainly hinted at something dark behind the gleeful smiling of Sebastian Stan. The film itself seemed quite as aware of my expectations as well (a theme among horror movies this year), letting the first third of its runtime play as a slow-burn “there has to be something wrong with this guy” type of story. We watch our protagonist (the first of two 2022 star-turn roles for Daisy Edgar-Jones) go on date after date with a man she meets in the grocery store and wait for the other shoe to drop. He even ominously invites her back to his house before the two go on a big vacation out in the country…
And then, 45 minutes in, he drugs her, reveals he’s a cannibal surgeon who sells human flesh to the highest bidder and the opening titles begin to roll. I stood up from my couch and applauded. What a brilliant way to turn a movie on its head. Speaking of…
Barbarian: Head Trauma
The only thing I knew about Barbarian [dir. Zach Cregger] going in was that I wanted to know as little as possible about it beforehand. I avoided watching the trailer, refused to read the HBO Max description of it, just turned out the lights and turned on the movie. Similar to Fresh, the first third of the movie built a sense of palpable dread as a woman (Georgina Campbell) discovers her AIRBNB is already occupied by a young man (Bill Skarsgård) and ever red flag appears. The movie, again much like Fresh, was setting things up for an eventual turn where the man’s sinister motives would be revealed. It was a matter of if, not when.
Sure enough, the woman eventually found a murder room in the basement and predictably freaked out. But, much like every dumb character in a horro movie, she lets the man back in to “let him investigate”. Surely, this was part of his trap and the turn I’d been waiting for would finally happen. He even lured her back into the basement which she willingly followed, even further revealing a secret cave filled with cages. This was it, this was where the man would trap Georgina and then, wait—
Holy shit. Holy fucking shit! I laughed so goddamn hard out of nervous reflex — what in the world did I just see? And then we hard cut to the PCH where Justin Long, an actor we had not yet seen in the movie, was driving blissfully along in a top-down convertible? Genuinely shocking, absolutely incredible. Bravo!
RRR: The Flashback
Like with The Batman, the Tollywood sensation RRR [dir. S. S. Rajamouli] spends every second of its epic runtime justifying the length. In fact, there were a few moments I could have picked out, many of which were mentioned in Patrick Willems’ masterful video essay on its greatness (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPU2D5Ftjbw). From the character introductions to the impeccable bridge sequence and even the Naatu Naatu dance-off any number of scenes could have made it to this spot.
But one sequence in particular stood out to me. Throughout the first half of the film we follow two characters quickly become the best of friends, but we also know that one of them, Raj(Ram Charan), holds a secret—he is a spy working for the British attempting to infiltrate revolutionaries and find the man he has befriended. By the end of the first act he has revealed himself and captured the other man, Bheem (N. T. Rama Rao, Jr.) and is clearly the villain as we cut to intermission. It seems clear the plot of the second act will be for Bheem to escape and get his revenge on Raj.
Except that’s not what happens, not even close. We do not open Act II in the present but, instead, with a lengthy flashback (nearly half an hour). It is during this time that we learn the true nature of Raj. Yes, he works for the British, but only as part of a larger plan. You see, it turns out his father trained his entire village to use weapons to fight back against British oppression. Raj is, in fact, more of a revolutionary than even Bheem. He is working from the inside to avenge his father’s death and will stop at nothing, even ruining a friendship, to achieve his goals. This sequence recontectualizes everything that came before and makes a once straightforward movie into something much more dense and complex. It would be a fun movie without the twist, but it’s a far better one with it.
Everything Everywhere All at Once: On The Rocks
I won’t lie, I didn’t love Everything Everywhere All at Once [dir. Daniels Kwan & Scheinert] as much as it seems most people did (I have it as 4/5 stars on Letterboxd), but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t still one of my favorite movies of the year. Nor does it mean that nothing stood out to me in a huge, meaningful way. In fact, there are parts of this film I still think about vividly that will stick with me for a long time.
Everything Everywhere is a loud and chaotic film about a million different things all at once. It’s a film about how even the smallest decisions we make can have ripple effects beyond our comprehension. It’s about the ways small microaggressions can lead to greatly strained relationships, particularly between parents and children (something I’m acutely aware of in my own life) as Evelyn (the incredible Michelle Yeoh) struggles to connect with her adult daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu). It’s about the struggle to make it as an immigrant in America. It’s about how living with regret and wondering how differnt life could have been can eat away at you until the day you die.
It’s also about how, if we can never know the true nature of reality, then why does anything matter? The villain’s entire argument is that, now that they know everything they are sure that there is no meaning anymore and our hero, rather than fight against this notion, begins to wonder if that is really true. But the masterstroke is that, maybe, whether or not anything matters doesn’t actually matter. And it is at that point that the film takes a slight detour and quiets down.
Even writing this out to get to that clip has me wondering if I’m underestimating this movie. As uneven as I find the second act to be it is moments like this that I think make Everything Everywhere truly special. We are lucky enough to live in the universe we do now, one with our loved ones, friends, hobbies, careers, etc. Imagining what else could have been is terrifying, but it doesn’t have to be. (And if nothing else, I hope this movie also encourages new people to discover the films of Wong Kar-Wai)
All Quiet on the Western Front: Quiet, Indeed
Tony Zhao once ran an amazing YouTube channel called Every Frame a Painting. In many ways that channel was my film-watching school, so many short yet thorough examinations of the ways filmmakers used their various visual techniques to instill deeper meaning into their work beyond what was written in the text. Every frame of every film, as the channel’s title suggests, is a painting waiting to be deciphered.
I do think that the film-bro obsession over great shots has become incredibly reductive (and far from what Tony seemed to be talking about). It’s not about how long your takes are or how stunning the visuals, but what your camera captures says to the audience about the world you are putting on screen. The picture above, on its own, is just a very pretty portrait of a European hillscape forest during sunrise in winter.
But there is a much deeper context to place it in, and in that context that shot, the one that opens the 2022 version of All Quiet on the Western Front [dir. Edward Berger], is saying so much about the damage World War I did to Europe and, by extension, the world we live in today.
All Quiet has the tall task of being the third adaptation of a truly remarkable 1929 novel detailing the downward spiral of four young men who excitedly enlisted in The Great War to fight for Germany. Just one year later, the first adaptation premiered and became the first talkie to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards. It is also a personal favorite of mine that I will recommend to anyone willing to watch an depressing, violent (even by today’s standards), anti-war film from 1930.
The 2022 adaptation makes a bold choice that deviates from the 1979 one which, like the original, chose to follow the story of the book fairly closely all the way to the end. Berger, rather, uses the book’s story and characters as inspiration to dive further into the ways WWI would leave scars on this world, ways that nobody in 1929 or 1930 could have known. The biggest change lies in how the story ends, detailing exactly how the ending of this war could and would lead directly to Naziism and Fascism throughout Europe. This war would take a once proud continent, a place full of natural and historical beauty (however fraught it may be) and destroy it so thoroughly that we would barely recognize it in two decade’s time.
And so the movie opens on this shot, one of total peace and quiet. The war, as we will soon learn, is already ongoing, but there is still some life and beauty left in the European hills and forests. We linger on this for a while, only hearing the wind, and we cut next to trees within the forest. We see nature long before we see war, because once we see that there’s no coming back.
