Back in the fall, we were so uncertainly about the prospects of discussing the best movies of 2020 in a timely fashion that we decided to call it early and do a best-movies-of-the-year podcast in September. Who knew when anything would get back to normal, if ever? As it turns out, we’re well into 2021 and things still haven’t gotten back to normal (and no amount of pushing the Oscars into April has changed that). But something that stayed the same, albeit in weird and different shapes, were movies, in that there were good movies all through 2020, and in a hell year–hell, a hell-year-plus–that’s still worth talking about. So here we are, talking about the best movies of 2020 again; this time in writing, though a podcast will soon follow, too. And if we (I, Jesse) didn’t get this up until March, well, we’re still having the conversation earlier than the Oscars. That’s gotta count for something, right? Maybe in a few months, you can even start to think about how you might see revivals of these movies out in the real world again. The best movies of 2020 are here for you well into 2021 and beyond! Herewith, Sara, Marisa, Jeremy, Jesse, and Nathaniel talk about their collective favorites.
Continue reading The 20 Best Movies of 2020
All posts by Jesse
Jesse is a cofounder of SportsAlcohol.com even though he doesn't care for sports or alcohol. His favorite movie is Ron Howard's The Paper. I think. This is what happens when you don't write your own bio. I know for sure likes pie.
Latest posts by Jesse (see all)
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- The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Top Summer Movies of 2004 - August 6, 2024
COMING 2 AMERICA Sells Itself Short
Sometimes, usually around the Super Bowl, an enterprising corporation will entice a famous actor to reprise a famous role for 30 or 60 seconds at a time. Whether it’s Jeff Bridges briefly returning to The Dude or Mike Myers and Dana Carvey doing one more Wayne’s World sketch, these reanimations can light up our nostalgia receptors with warm hit of recognition. They’re also commonplace enough to diminish with every passing year. The ads themselves may technically vary in cleverness, but most of them amount to a momentary spark, quickly dampened–whether by lame jokes, depressing shilling, or simply the cruel visibility of time’s passage. Coming 2 America, a 33-years-later sequel to one of Eddie Murphy’s better comedies, is like watching that type of Super Bowl ad for 105 minutes, give or take. Imagine how much dampening that involves.
The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Silence of the Lambs at 30
SportsAlcohol.com mainstay Sara has a Valentine’s Day tradition: Watch The Silence of the Lambs. Valentine’s Day does happen to be the movie’s anniversary–and in 2021, it turned 30 years young! So the SportsAlcohol crew decided to join in on the ritual (virtually, of course), rewatching Jonathan Demme’s Oscar-winning (and, yes, somewhat problematic) feminist serial-killer thriller and getting together to talk about that, plus the careers of both Demme and, uh, Lecter. So if you’ve ever wanted to listen to Sara, Jesse, Marisa, Ben, and Jeremy talk about Michael Mann, Brett Ratner, Matthew Modine, the Oscars, message movies, Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, and Thandie Newton in one packed episode, then SportsAlcohol.com has done it again! Happy Valentine’s Day to no one! Seriously, though, it’s a good episode.
We are now up to SEVEN (7) different ways to listen to a SportsAlcohol podcast:
- You can subscribe to our podcast using the rss feed.
- I’m not sure why they allowed it, but we are on iTunes! If you enjoy what you hear, a positive comment and a rating would be great.
- I don’t really know what Stitcher is, but we are also on Stitcher.
- SportsAlcohol.com is a proud member of the Aha Radio Network. What is Aha? It’s kind of like Stitcher, but for your car.
- You can download the mp3 of this episode directly here
- Our most recent episode or two will sometimes be available on our Soundcloud
- You can listen to the episode (and a bunch of great songs!) in the players below.
The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Best Music of 2020
Normally, we try to do some end-of-the-year music coverage timed to the period between the winding down of the calendar year and airing of the Grammy awards in February. This year, I have no fucking clue when the Grammys are even happening. I think they were pushed back? I assume Taylor Swift was nominated for a bunch of stuff? Anyway, the point is, this year in music was as weird as this year in everything else, which stymied any attempt to make a collective list of the best songs or albums. However, we did arrive at a few consensus favorites to discuss, so Marisa, Jesse, Rob, Sara, and Jeremy got together to talk about Phoebe Bridgers, Waxahatchee, Fiona Apple, HAIM, and some artists who aren’t white ladies! (But, honestly, not that many.) We also talked about how our listening habits changed, what old music we found ourselves digging into during quar, the stans who cyberbullied Jesse, and how Jeremy doesn’t know anything about the Beatles. It’s a lot. But it’s a fun conversation to accompany our excellent series of Track Marks song write-ups. Plus, we may not have an essay about the best song or record of the year, but we do have a playlist featuring selections from our collective and individual tastes! Check it out below!
We are now up to SEVEN (7) different ways to listen to a SportsAlcohol podcast:
- You can subscribe to our podcast using the rss feed.
- I’m not sure why they allowed it, but we are on iTunes! If you enjoy what you hear, a positive comment and a rating would be great.
- I don’t really know what Stitcher is, but we are also on Stitcher.
- SportsAlcohol.com is a proud member of the Aha Radio Network. What is Aha? It’s kind of like Stitcher, but for your car.
- You can download the mp3 of this episode directly here
- Our most recent episode or two will sometimes be available on our Soundcloud
- You can listen to the episode (and a bunch of great songs!) in the players below.
The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: The Films of David Fincher
With David Fincher’s Mank dominating cultural conversation as a Netflix smash (?!?!), we figured: What better time to obsess over America’s most obsessive filmmaker? In another two-part episode, the all-star team of Rob, Marisa, Sara, Nathaniel, Jeremy, and Jesse virtually convened to talk about each and every David Fincher film, from the big-budget Alien sequel he disowned to the black-and-white labor of love he made about… screenwriting?! Is Zodiac his only great movie? Does Mank live up to the hype/backlash cycle? Who loves The Game? These are all questions we are well-qualified to answer to the tune of Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor, so put on your green filters, start poring over serial killer files, and let’s do it.
We are now up to SEVEN (7) different ways to listen to a SportsAlcohol podcast:
- You can subscribe to our podcast using the rss feed.
- I’m not sure why they allowed it, but we are on iTunes! If you enjoy what you hear, a positive comment and a rating would be great.
- I don’t really know what Stitcher is, but we are also on Stitcher.
- SportsAlcohol.com is a proud member of the Aha Radio Network. What is Aha? It’s kind of like Stitcher, but for your car.
- You can download the mp3 of this episode directly here for part one and here for part two.
- Our most recent episode or two will sometimes be available on our Soundcloud
- You can listen to both episodes in the players below.
The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: The Films of Martin Scorsese
For an episode so long in the works that we decided to make it two episodes, the SportsAlcohol.com film buddies decided to take on the filmography of Martin Scorsese. He doesn’t have a new movie out, and probably won’t until 2022, but we’ve been stuck inside for much of the past year, and Scorsese has such a rich (AND VARIED) filmography that it’s always a pleasure to go flipping back through it. Plus, Raging Bull recently turned 40, Goodfellas recently turned 30, and Casino recently turned 25! Scorsese has so many movies, you can find a significant anniversary virtually any year. So while you prep for the upcoming 10th anniversary of Hugo and 15th anniversary of The Departed, why not kick back with our career-spanning retrospective, wherein we have at least some form of discussion about every fiction film Martin Scorsese has ever made! We talk about the gangster ones, the pulp ones, the religious ones, the early ones, the Leo ones, and more! Do not let Jesse have watched Boxcar Bertha in vain!
We are now up to SEVEN (7) different ways to listen to a SportsAlcohol podcast:
- You can subscribe to our podcast using the rss feed.
- I’m not sure why they allowed it, but we are on iTunes! If you enjoy what you hear, a positive comment and a rating would be great.
- I don’t really know what Stitcher is, but we are also on Stitcher.
- SportsAlcohol.com is a proud member of the Aha Radio Network. What is Aha? It’s kind of like Stitcher, but for your car.
- You can download the mp3 of this episode directly here for part one and here for part two.
- Our most recent episode or two will sometimes be available on our Soundcloud
- You can listen to both episodes in the players below.
In THE LITTLE THINGS, Denzel Washington sticks around for more afternoon-cable pulp
There are times when it’s easy to lose patience with Denzel Washington for his steadfast dedication to being a movie star. Here is one of the best actors of his generation, a popular two-time Oscar winner with fine taste in theater classics and a willingness to complicate his megawatt charisma, who nonetheless frequently makes movies designed to play on some Turner-owned cable station or another in weekend-afternoon perpetuity.
Yet Washington, who has always appeared in pulp but has done so more often after 50, has stuck around in crime thrillers, vigilante thrillers, and serial-killer-chasing thrillers for so long that his junky one-for-them studio pictures can, under the right lighting, look like comfort. The Little Things, his new Warner Bros. movie premiering in theaters and HBO Max simultaneously, has the right lighting. Specifically, it’s lit in Diet David Fincher greens and streetlamps at night, a more richly moody look than anything I’ve seen before from writer-director John Lee Hancock. Hancock is taking a break from his usual Americana; rather than observing the men who caught Bonnie and Clyde or the unctuous franchising of McDonald’s or the white-knuckle production of Mary Poppins, he’s simply on the trail of Denzel Washington, on the trail of a serial killer, throwing back only so far as 1990. Canny, setting a cops-versus-killer narrative at the dawn of that narrative’s big-studio heyday.
Continue reading In THE LITTLE THINGS, Denzel Washington sticks around for more afternoon-cable pulp
Women of Action: MONSTER HUNTER and SHADOW IN THE CLOUD
The recent movie Shadow in the Cloud sounds like it could be one of those occasional January miracles: an efficient, unpretentious genre mish-mash executed with no-fuss brawn and style. It’s about Maude Garrett (Chloe Grace Moretz), a WWII flight officer who hitches a last-minute ride on a bomber, where she is beset by sexism, then Japanese fighter planes, then gremlins. Shadow is so theoretically January-tastic that it dropped on the very first of the year, a rare release date made more feasible by the global pandemic, which has sent the film to first-run VOD as well as a few theaters simultaneously.
The hybrid release model is unusually appropriate for this movie; for its entire 83 minutes (or rather, for the 75 minutes it actually runs minus credits), it straddles the line between unusually ambitious, well-made trash and the chintzy direct-to-video garbage of old. The movie even provides its own convenient delineation: there’s the sizable chunk of the story confined to Maude’s cramped stay in the plane’s ball turret, communicating with her mostly-offscreen co-stars via radio, versus the mayhem-heavier sequences where she exits the ball turret to fight off those human-sized beasties. The filmmakers seem torn over whether its low-budget ridiculousness should be elegantly elided, or powered through with smash-and-grab energy.
Continue reading Women of Action: MONSTER HUNTER and SHADOW IN THE CLOUD
Liam Neeson Cosplays Late-Late-Period Clint Eastwood in THE MARKSMAN
There is no shortage of Clint Eastwood. He may not star in movies as regularly anymore, but his late-late-period career has featured so many roles that seemed like de facto retirement ceremonies that Gran Torino, Trouble with the Curve, and The Mule feel closer together than they are, spread out over the course of a decade. He has at least one more starring role to go; his movie Cry Macho is due out by the end of 2021. By then, he will be 91. The Mule, his last not-quite-last movie made $100 million in the United States. He is easily the most popular eighty-and-ninetysomething actor and director in Hollywood history.
Yet at some point, very likely in the next five to ten years, Clint Eastwood will no longer make movies. (This is not a prediction of his death, mind. If it’s easy to picture any movie star making it to 110, it’s Clint.) He will leave behind the perception that a certain segment of the moviegoing public really enjoys seeing middle-to-advanced-aged men put younger bad guys in their place. 2009’s Taken, starring Liam Neeson, is generally considered to have kicked off the modern strain of old-man-vengeance thrillers, but Eastwood was there a few weeks earlier with 2008’s Grand Torino, just as big a hit with an even older protagonist. (Neeson was a spry 57 when Taken came out, compared with Eastwood’s 79 at the same time.)
Continue reading Liam Neeson Cosplays Late-Late-Period Clint Eastwood in THE MARKSMAN
The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Wonder Woman 1984
What now seems like a solid century ago, we held a discussion about the 2017 smash hit Wonder Woman in the context of the modern superhero movie. Now Wonder Woman is back on the big screen but mainly on a bunch of small ones as Wonder Woman 1984 premieres on HBO Max to the delight/consternation of viewers, fans, critics, and Twitter People everywhere. A SportsAlcohol.com nerd crew of Rob, Jon, Jesse, and Marisa wade through our own reactions as well as some popular (and sometimes baffling!) internet gripes to discuss the pros and cons of Wonder Woman 1984, a sequel that, depending on your mileage, we may have liked more than you?! Listen up and find out!
We are now up to SEVEN (7) different ways to listen to a SportsAlcohol podcast:
- You can subscribe to our podcast using the rss feed.
- I’m not sure why they allowed it, but we are on iTunes! If you enjoy what you hear, a positive comment and a rating would be great.
- I don’t really know what Stitcher is, but we are also on Stitcher.
- SportsAlcohol.com is a proud member of the Aha Radio Network. What is Aha? It’s kind of like Stitcher, but for your car.
- You can download the mp3 of this episode directly here.
- Our most recent episode or two will sometimes be available on our Soundcloud
- You can listen in the player below.