Annual top 10 list are boring and dumb and stupid and dumb and boring and, and, and dumb. At Reel Entropy, we aspire to track movies over time, and as such, instead of bringing you personal picks for the best movies of 2018, we’re going to put together a list of what should be the most influential.
Images courtesy Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, Paramount Pictures, RLJE Films, Sony Pictures Releasing, Warner Bros. Pictures and Netflix, respectively.
It me! Images courtesy Annapurna Pictures.
5/10 In 2015, tired of making Will Ferrell movies, Adam McKay wrote and directed The Big Short, a strange docu-comedy that aimed to explain to mass audiences how the 2008 economic collapse happened, and that movie won a ton of awards and nominations even though it was essentially just a more boring Wolf of Wall Street with more explicit moralizing about illegal stock market practices and the 2008 recession is really not that complicated anyway.
So here we are, three years later, and he made another one, this time going after former vice president Dick Cheney.
Images courtesy Paramount Pictures.
4/10 It’s 2018. The Transformers series was met with poor critical reception pretty much on arrival, but last year brought with it the first indication that audiences might be growing tired of it as well. Franchise director Michael Bay, who has a history of sexualizing underage girls in his movies, could get #metoo’d at any moment. Paramount Pictures needs proof that its star franchise can successful without Bay and all that he brings with him, with a potentially different cast of characters and on a much smaller scale, proof that it can remain a reliable and more varied source of income going into its second decade of existence.
Enter Bumblebee.
Images courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.
2/10 Last year, The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro’s fairy tale love story about banging a frog person, won best picture, and I warned at the time to be ready for an influx of movies about sexy frog people.
Now, almost a year to the day after Shape of Water’s wide release, Warner Bros. has released Aquaman, its superhero spin on the classic frog person myth, starring Jason Momoa as the most conventionally sexy frog person that ever croaked. As with most movies crimping off an Oscar winner, Aquaman is pretty awful.
Emily Blunt is practically perfect in every way, but this is also true in Sicario and Edge of Tomorrow. Images courtesy Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.
3/10 The original Mary Poppins was a technical marvel, one that reinvigorated a dying genre and would be held unto this day as the crowning triumph of Disney productions. It was sold and resold and resold again on the strength of how timely and cutting-edge it was in 1964.
But now is not 1964.
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