FLOW CHART

The Oscar nominations came out earlier this week; Your Humble Narrator graciously waited until afterwards to present my Top Ten List for 2024, so as not to make the Academy's announcement an anticlimax. Here, roughly in order of preference, are the ten films that I think I liked best this year:

1. Flow--No movie last year meant quite as much to me as this wordless, visually exquisite animated feline adventure from Latvia.  

2. Conclave--This Vatican melodrama has the sweep of a great silent, but also humane and lovable performances, especially that of Ralph Fiennes.

3. The Bikeriders--Compelling, beautifully shot wheeler held together by the funny, sensible performance of Jodie Comer.

4. Heretic--Comparative religion debate in horror movie form; it goes a bit too gruesome in the homestretch, perhaps, and it's defamatory toward blueberry pie, but Hugh Grant's performance is a tour de force.

5. A Complete Unknown--Dylan's early years make for a conventional but enjoyable and musically rich biopic.

6. Nickel Boys--The horrors of a Florida reform school for boys, and the triumph of friendship, both seen from the point of view of two of the boys. Heartbreaking but thrilling.

7. A Real Pain--Two Jewish cousins from New York go to Poland together to explore their grandmother's Holocaust experience. Kieran Culkin is marvelous as the loud, nervy inappropriate one; writer-director Jesse Eisenberg's performance as the quiet one would be easy to overlook, but he's also terrific.

8. Kneecap--West Belfast lads stir up trouble performing hip hop in Irish, as in the Irish language; hard to resist.

9. Sing Sing--Colman Domingo is a powerhouse at the center of this drama about the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program at the title correctional facility; many of his superb costars are actual veterans of the program.

10. Anora--Brooklyn sex worker marries Russian oligarch's playboy son and imagines it's forever. The movie goes on too long and has a few complications too many, but it's ruefully funny, and Mikey Madison is great in the title role.

A few other titles that I found worth watching in 2024: The Fire Inside, Love Lies Bleeding, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Queer, My Old Ass, Between the Temples, Saturday Night, Thelma, Challengers, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the long-belated Pitch People and Francis Ford Coppola's infuriating yet inspiring Megalopolis. It's also important to note that there are many other major flicks, notably The Brutalist, The Substance, Wicked, Hard Truths, The Last Showgirl and September 5, that I haven't caught up with yet.

You can check out my short article, online at Phoenix Magazine, on this year's Chandler International Film Festival, running today through February 2.

Finally, for the kind few who might possibly care, here's the embarrassingly short list of books I read in 2024 (excluidng, as always, short stories, articles, poems, comics, fridge magnets, instruction manuals, road signs and stuff I'm re-reading):

The Great Time Machine Hoax by Keith Laumer

Prequel: An  American Fight Against Fascism by Rachel Maddow

Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again by Shigeru Kayama

Eneas Africanus by Harry Stillwell Edwards

Billy Summers by Stephen King

Playback by Raymond Chandler

Bound to Rise by Horatio Alger, Jr.

My Childhood by Maxim Gorky

She'll Never Get Off the Ground by Robert J. Serling

PO THINGS

Opening this weekend:

Kung Fu Panda 4--The titular mammal, Po, has been promoted from "Dragon Warrior" to the more exalted status of Spiritual Leader, and is expected to find and train a replacement for his former position. But he'd rather not; he'd like to just keep having butt-kicking adventures on his own.

This entry, set again in a fairy-tale Chinese past inhabited by talking animals, has Po capturing Zhen, a light-footed cutpurse fox. The "Furious Five" of the earlier films is away on assignment, so the imprisoned Zhen talks Po into letting her serve as a guide on a quest to the distant lair of a villainous shape-shifting lizard, The Chameleon. See where this is headed?

This Dreamworks series has been at the less exhausting, more rewarding end of the CGI animated family flick spectrum starting with the original, back in 2008, and continuing with the first two sequels. It's hard to say if it will be sustainable from now on, but this fourth film, at least, keeps the streak going. The story deals in the usual kid-movie platitudes, but the lighting-fast yet precise slapstick sequences are exciting, and rise at times to laugh-out-loud funny even for adults.  

The voice cast in this film, as in the earlier films, is unusually strong too. Jack Black is exuberant as ever as Po, and is joined again by Dustin Hoffman as the red panda master Shifu, Bryan Cranston as Po's biological father and the great James Hong as Po's adoptive father (a goose, you'll recall). Ian McShane returns from the first film as a sinister snow leopard. New cast members include Ke Huy Quan as a pangolin bandit, and the mighty and menacing Viola Davis as The Chameleon. But the showcase new role is Awkwafina as Zhen; she fits the series like a glove.

In another pretty good touch: Tenacious D rousingly covers "Hit Me Baby One More Time" over the credits.

Opening today at Harkins Shea 14:

Pitch People--Back in the late '60s I was fascinated by the Veg-o-Matic, the infamous manual vegetable chopper sold on TV by Ronco; it's one of my earliest consumerist memories. After numerous appeals to my poor Mom, she wearily ordered one, and we quickly learned that it did not significantly improve the efficiency of her kitchen. Decades later my kid, around the age of eight, insisted on ordering a Snackeez, a drinking cup with a compartment for snacks at the top likewise peddled on TV. The speed with which she lost interest in it was ineffably heart-tugging to me; I could hear "The Circle of Life" playing in my head.

This documentary, directed by Stanley Jacobs, is about the people who have sold products of all kinds, with kitchen gadgets a special favorite, by "pitching" them; demonstrating them with a performer's panache. The art goes back thousands of years, no doubt--it's described here as "the second oldest profession"--but this movie's focus is on the American and British practitioners who took it from boardwalks, notably Atlantic City, to state fairs to shopping malls to TV commercials and later, after Reagan-era deregulation, to "infomercials." 

It's a brisk, amusing, revealing chronicle. Strikingly, many of the veterans we meet here are related to each other, members of the Morris family, with connections to the Popeil family behind Ronco (the credits pointedly declare that "RON POPEIL WOULD NOT GRANT AN INTERVIEW FOR THIS FILM"). They gleefully dissect the strategies for separating audience members from their money, but they don't seem contemptuous of them, and we're told that they truly believe in their products. In any case, they show a certain guileless pride in their performing skills. It's as if the entertainment value of their pitches should offset any disappointment in what they're selling.

Along with Arnold and Lester Morris, talking heads here include Ed McMahon, an Atlantic City pitch veteran before his TV stardom, and Wally Nash, a Brit whose effortless old-school pitch of the "hand-hammered wok from the People's Republic of China" I watched countless times on late-night TV in DC. Re-watching it on YouTube I was amazed at how much I could still say along with him; I wanted to buy one every freakin' time I saw it. 

Inevitably the extended footage of performances makes up the strongest passages of Pitch People. It's also hilarious when we see behind-the-scenes footage of an infomercial rehearsal in which the presenters break several demo models of a slicer before realizing that they're using it wrong.

Alas, a number of the pitchers featured here have left us, as this movie was made in 1999. It saw play at festivals back then but was not picked up by a distributor, and actually had to be restored before it could get a proper release, a quarter of a century after it was completed. There's a delicious and stinging irony in the fact that this movie about selling failed, until now, to sell. Maybe it needed a better pitch.