Movies I Watched in 2021: My Top 10

A long overdue list, and a more complete version of (probably) my favourite movies that I watched during the calendar year of 2021. I published my annual Top 50 on time, but I figured I should get these out before I start tackling the project of the best watches of 2022, hopefully set to come out before August 2023.

I distinctly remember writing a good chunk of this in January 2022, and trying to force myself into discussing a through line between them .As mentioned in a couple of these overdue articles, the benefit of hindsight is so interesting. It wasn’t clear then, but now it seems like so many of these movies below are sight and sound movies; visceral experiences that provoke the senses. Days of Heaven and Master & Commander have the obvious visual quality. You can smell the ocean in Master and Commander too. Feel the rock of the boat. Eat Drink Man Woman has the smell and feel of a kitchen. Barton Fink the dream/nightmare-like quality. The Excorcist makes one’s skin crawl. And then Blow Out and Sound of Metal are two of the most iconic ‘sound’ movies ever.

I have always felt that plot drives my interest for many movies. Reflecting on this a little bit, perhaps as my pallete grows, and my attention span and patience theoretically get better, I am learning to feel certain movies more than simply just following them.

I typically like to order these, but I am finding it especially fruitless. With such a variance of movies too, here is just a general top ten, in no order.

• Sound of Metal (2020)
• Eat Drink Man Woman (1994)
• The Exorcist (1973)
• LA Confidential (1997)
• Blow Out (1981)
• Days of Heaven (1978)
• Master and Commander (2003)
• Best in Show (2000)
• Barton Fink (1991)
• Stalag 17 (1953)

Here are my particular thoughts on each:

Sound of Metal (2020) — directed by Darius Marder

My favourite movie from the year 2020. A film about a heavy metal drummer coping with the loss of his hearing. An unbelievable performance from Riz Ahmed, it gives an honest portrayal of the both the grief and joy that can be found in the struggles of life.

Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) — directed by Ang Lee

Eat Drink Man Woman is Ang Lee’s last movie before he made the transition to Hollywood in the mid 90s. He would go on to continue making Chinese films (with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in 2000), but EDMW is a love letter to food and family and the troubles that come with devoting your life to both. The Zhu family faces various difficulties as the three adult daughters navigate maturing into independent women in a society quickly modernizing around them, all under the careful but loving watch of their aging widowed father, a retired chef.

It’s a visually stunning movie with many scenes dedicated to cooking fantastically delicious meals. Eat Drink is not so subtly predicated on the idea that food still brings family together regardless of the problems at the surface of their relationships. It is comedic but still overtly earnest in depiction of the struggles of familial bonds, and currently sits atop my list of favourite Ang Lee movies; a not so easy feat.

The Exorcist (1973) — directed by William Friedkin

If you haven’t seen it — without spoiling much — there are probably tropes you’re aware of you didn’t even know were from this movie. I had the pleasure of seeing this in theatres, and it completely lived up to the hype as a sublime experience of what horror at it’s best when you’re 100% engaged.

At the same time, it is more than just a horror. The movie starts with an extended table setting sequence in the ancient city of Hatra in Iraq. What follows is an investigative, philosphical mystery set in Georgetown, DC, with priest Father/Dr Damiek Karras (played by Jason Miller) at it’s centre. It’s an impressive feat to keep curiosity and suspense so high regardless of most new viewers sort of knowing where the movie is headed. The movie is able to do it nonetheless.

LA Confidential (1997) — directed by Curtis Hanson

LA Confidential is the type of movie I was immediately captured by upon watching it. I quickly wanted to see again. It starts off as a campy LA noir type film, underscored by character/narrator Danny DeVito. The movie follows three vastly different police officers. Kevin Spacey as Jack Vincennes, Russell Crowe as Bud White, and Guy Pearce as Edmund Exley. Vincennes is a celebrity cop, White is a meathead rule breaker who beats up domestic abusers, and Exley is an ambitious, green, by-the-book type officer following in his father’s footsteps.

The story itself has a lot of moving parts, following the long line of Los Angeles corruption movies. The plot moves well , and is not the be-all-end-all of enjoyment. It does take too much trouble focusing too much on exposition, but moving along with the frenetic pace of the wild characters. The film does the perfect job of showing, not telling, everything you need to know about every character, with great bits of high and low acting from all of it’s main characters. The tertiary characters of DeVito, James Cromwell, David Strathairn, and especially Kim Basinger, give the movie a breadth and depth to the buzzing conflict of the movie.

Blow Out (1981) — directed by Brian De Palma

I want to dive deeper into the thesis at some point, but to me the late 70s/early 80s are there own mini-genre. They stick out, with modern flairs, but stark reminders and styles of an aging era. It can likely be bookmarked between Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Anyhow, that is to say that Blow Out is on the end of the political/conspiracy thrillers of the era that boomed post-Watergate.

This movie immediately stuck with me as a bona fide excellent political thriller. Travolta’s ‘Jack Terri’ is a sound tech for movies, and spends much of his time recording and editing bites to be played in the crappy B-movies he primarily works on. He inadvertently gets tied up in a political assassination plot. It is a creative idea — sound typically gets lost amidst the impressiveness visual spectacle of movies. The turning of switches, the sound of the machines creating sound, ever technical close-up, to put you inside Jack’s body as he mixes. It feels real. It feels important. It feels like the copy of the tape he made is the only one in the world, because it is.

This movie stuck with me, and I was elated when it came to the Hamilton Playhouse about a month ago. Natalie and I saw it, and it lived up to the hype again. The visual spectacle is no less impressive at times. We need to bring back the handheld nature of helicopter shots, versus the somehow boring and static nature of a moving drone shot.

To put a bow on it, this is probably Travolta’s best movie as the lead as well, and a movie I would recommend to just about anybody.

Days of Heaven (1978) — directed by Terrence Malick

The most visually stunning movie on this list, Days of Heaven’s cinematography is it’s obvious calling card as it captures the beauty of farm work on a farm in the rural Texas Panhandle at every season of the year and every hour of the day.

Though not overly plot heavy, I was perhaps expecting an even more somatic experience. The love triangle Richard Gere, Brook Adams, and Sam Shepard find themselves has no trouble in maintaining interest as you soak in the tranquil shots in every scene.

Master and Commander (2003) — director by Peter Weir

Another visceral experience on this list — of which I’m realizing there are many, Master and Commander is perhaps most similar to Sound of Metal in terms of its juxtaposition between quiet and loud. The quiet moments, as they explore the Galapagos Islands, may feel unecessary. Every scene between Russell Crowe as Captain Jack Aubrey, and Paul Bettany as Stephen Maturin; surgeon and best friend to Jack, feels a little longer than necessary. Letting scenes linger, in the way deep friendships wax and wane in their high and low moments, allows for such a greater breadth of connection to remain unspoken between the two characters.

The loud moments are incredible too, as the buildup to them is so strong, but pays off excellently. The movie spent 10 days shooting in the Galapagos; the first non-documentary film to do shoot there. The versimilitude of being on the actual ship, or filming in the midst of a battle, cannot be replicated on a soundstage. The effort was worth it.

What is also the second Crowe movie on this list, at the time I watched I briefly wrote about just how impressed I am by his versatility and singularity in some of his greatest performances. He is functionally an action star in this, Gladiator, and LA Confidential, but doubles as an intellect in all of those roles. Other succesful performances like A Beautiful Mind and The Insider bear that out as well, and it’s a unique persona as far as I can tell. Perhaps most compareable is Harrison Ford.As endearing as that dry Han Solo sense of humour can be, in my mind it would undercut the seriousness of the roles Crowe embodies. Perhaps Tom Hardy, Chris Pine, or Denzel at times may be better examples. One way or another, I found myself with a greater appreciation for Crowe whose peak as an A+ list actor seemed to crest quicker than I feel it should have.

Best in Show (2000) — directed by Christopher Guest

Spinal Tap, Borat, Popstar, Tour de Pharmacy, Surf’s Up, Trailer Park Boys. I had very little nerves going into Best in Show that it was going to go right into the pantheon of certfiied banger mockumentaries that I have always loved. It fully lived up to the hype, with the its small time humble American feel, perfectly imitating the eccentric hobbies many people find community and purpose in. It’s a talented cast that director Christopher Guest lets off the leash, including himself as the great Harlan Pepper, with one of my favourite scenes below

Barton Fink (1991) — directed by Ethan and Joel Coen

The titular Barton Fink (played by John Turturro) is about an up and coming New York playwright who moves to Hollywood to become a screenwriter. The Coens are almost showing off here with small techniques that contribute to the tone, along with a script that contains many a fun jabs at the culture and language of New Hollywood up to that point. Barton’s struggles with writers block are portayed through the bizarre, idiosyncratic lens of the Coen brothers as we the viewer begin to question Barton’s viewpoint as a reliable narrator. Turturro’s performance anchors the movie as a talented but awkward and confused man whose lost confidence in himself.

Barton also contains one of the great performances of the versatile John Goodman, along with other Coen staples Jon Polito and Steve Buscemi. They supplant it as another addition to the Coens body of work of uncanny valley movies where it’s a struggle if it’s your reading of the mood being “off,” and then simultaneously leading you in a direction you didn’t expect that may have been obvious the whole time.

Stalag 17 (1953) — directed by Billy Wilder

I am in continual awe of how we find new ways to tell similar stories. At the risk of sounding a little too pretentious, being told the plot or setting of a film tells me next to nothing about it. The dream-sense of The Thin Red Line, the lighthearted nature of The Great Escape, the gut-wrenching scenes in Saving Private Ryan, the courtoom drama that is a large chunk of Paths of Glory. That’s WW2 movies alone. Stalag-17 is a very fun, serious but not too serious story of men in a Prisoner of War camp continually having plans thwarted to escape. They begin to suspect one of them is an informant, and the conflict drives from there. Billy Wilder’s list of movies is strong, and though there are throughlines between his movies of course, his ability to cross genre continually impresses me.