This year, I only saw a handful of movies. I can’t say it was a good selection of movies available, so picking the best movie of the year is not really a fair judgment. A lot of movies were postponed (again) and there were also not a lot of movies to watch in general.
In 2021, these are the movies I watched:
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It
F9
Old
Black Widow
The Eternals
Shang-Chi
Halloween Kills
Venom Let There Be Carnage
No Time To Die
Matrix Resurrections
Spiderman No Way Home
If I had to rank these movies:
Shang-Chi
Spiderman No Way Home
No Time To Die
Black Widow
F9
Venom Let There Be Carnage
Matrix Resurrections
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It
The Eternals
Halloween Kills
Old
It’s funny when I see the list of movies, it seems a lot more than a handful. It felt like I only saw a few movies, but I guess I saw a bit more than I remembered. The Conjuring was a movie we had to rent online as theatres were closed where we live at the time. It was definitely not scary. I don’t even really remember what happened in the film. I still have a lot of faith in the franchise and Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson are pretty much Ed and Lorraine Warren, so I hope they do continue with a fourth installment soon.
I gave Shang-Chi the top spot over Spiderman just because it was a brand new film and it launched Simu Liu, Tony Leung, and Menger Zhang, and Asian culture in general, finally into the mainstream consciousness. When I watched the film, I recalled not thinking about anything else but the film in front of me. I’m a nervous type who’s constantly thinking about what I have to do next and so it’s really hard for me to focus for a long period of time without checking in and out. Shang-Chi held my attention from start to finish. It was funny. It was exciting. It was sad. One of the best scenes has to be when Shang-Chi’s dad is about to die and there’s a montage of him remembering moments with his son. I think the showdown at the end was slightly anti-climatic as it was too heavy on the special effects. But in general it was a great cinematic experience.
Shang-Chi has an A+ for originality but Spiderman No Way Home definitely wins for everything being amazing. The cast. The direction. The music. The hype. All of it. It’s a big Hollywood movie and I was totally there for it. Along with everyone else who made it the first $1 billion movie since the pandemic. It’s also the Spiderman film that finally catapults Tom Holland from like a kiddie actor to a man who’s an actor. When he’s full of rage and beating on the Green Goblin, you don’t see the youthful boy wonder anymore, but a grown up Avenger.
As for the worst movies I saw, I have to say Old was terrible. It started off with some promise, but then it devolved into another gimmick in which it wasn’t paranormal but it’s something of this world. I think M. Night Shyamalan would do better getting back to how the Sixth Sense was. It didn’t feel like a gimmick. It just felt like a movie that was clever. The movies he has made since, seems to always hinge on a twist and you tend to not pay attention to the story but rather trying to find clues that will lead you to the twist. I also don’t like how Shyamalan always has to insert himself as a character in all of his movies. There’s no harm or foul, but for some reason it just bugs me whenever I see him pop up. It’s not cute or fun like whenever Stan Lee made a cameo.
Halloween Kills wasn’t so terrible, but it was a huge letdown. I thought the cast was really strong especially Anthony Michael Hall and Kyle Richards. I wished in a way that the movie was more about the two kids Laurie Strode babysat on that first Halloween and have them go and try to fight back against Michael.
Hopefully 2022 will bring us more films to choose from. But hopefully too there won’t be any more delays or theatre closings.
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