leebutler Editorial

Best Performances of 2020

2020 has been the year of never ending badness, that would be the mildest statement one could make about this year. In general, it’s been a total shitshow with very few moments of happiness… so this year seems like a perfect time to start a new tradition on this blog, because why the hell not? It means I have fresh New Year’s content and that’s always nice to have fresh content so this is me saying what I felt the best performances of the year were.

Well, I say “Best” but much like with the best films of the year list, ‘BEST” in this context really means “Performances that I liked the most”. Maybe they weren’t in the best films, some of them might actually be in pretty bad films, but they’re the kind of performances that make you want to watch any film… and this is a top 20, because it’s my blog and I can do that sort of thing!

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leebutler Editorial

The Top Ten Worst Films of 2020

2020 has been the dumpster fire of years. Hell, calling it a dumpster fire almost feels like a compliment, at least a dumpster fire provides warmth and gets rid of garbage. The best thing we can say about 2020 is that Parasite won best picture during it and America decided to get rid of 239 pounds of fascist (I’m sorry, that was mean… he is much fatter than 239, which I’d like to remind everyone is the number that Simpson’s writers picked in order to set up the joke “You’re the fattest thing I’ve ever seen and I’ve been on safari”). Other than that, hundreds of thousands died from a disease that no one had ever seen before and the world shut down almost completely. It’s been a genuinely awful year that we will never forget even though we all want to. 

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leebutler Editorial

Oscar Predictions – 2020

Well, it’s that time of year again. The time when Hollywood gives itself a loving reach around in the form of statues with asses that resemble the ass of Bette Davis’ first husband. Much like last year, they’re going hostless because they realised people liked it when they didn’t spend 25 minutes hearing jokes from the host about how we’re running 15 minutes late. It’s also just because the Oscars are desperate to seem hip and cool, why do you think Joker has so many nominations? It’s not because of quality, it’s because they’re desperate for young people to tune in so they picked the movie they could stomach nominating (because nominating the comic book movie that wasn’t ashamed to be a comic book movie would just be impossible) and hope the audience of people who proclaim Joker to be the best movie ever will tune in to improve their sagging ratings. 

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leebutler Editorial

The Top Ten Worst Films of 2019

Well, here we are. The end of 2019 and we’ve gotten all the positive feelings out of our system, leaving us with a thick bile that needs to be expelled. That’s kind of how I feel about these lists, it’s more of a way for me to vent and purge out all the excess bad feelings I had towards some of the worst films of the year. Just need to get this out so I’m prepared for the year to come… and because I find it’s good to acknowledge just what mistakes were made over the last year, but mostly it’s just venting about things that’ve been bugging me for a while now and if we’re being honest, worst lists tend to just be venting by people who need a good bit of content. The rules I used for my best list carry over to this list too, go look at that list to check up on what those rules are (and to see if any films I liked match up with yours, because I thirst for views and attention) but first, some dishonourable mentions

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leebutler Editorial

The Top Ten Best Films of 2019

Looking back over the last 12 months, this has been a great year for movies. While the lows have been stunningly shocking, the heights have proved us just what this medium can do when it’s at its best. It’s the first year I will really look forward to the Oscar nominees because this year is going to give us some absolute classics and the most random batch of movies in that best picture spot. We’re now here to look back and talk about the 10 best films of the year… and by best I mean “The ones I like the most” because these lists are always subjective, there is no objective way to view and rate art but saying “Top 10 Films I Liked The Most” is not a good title for Google’s algorithm. Hell, I have enough that I liked this year that I could easily do a Top 20 without breaking a sweat (as the honourable mentions list will prove). So before we do this, ground rules time.

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leebutler Editorial

Sunshine Blogger Award

Introduction

 

Sometimes you wake up and find out that, as you slept, you got nominated for something big and important like a Nobel Peace Prize… othertimes you wake up to see you’ve been nominated for the Sunshine Blogger award, which is actually latin for “Fun silly listicle where half the work was done for you by the person who nominated you” which in this case was by the amazing The Blog Complainer who is just generally a great reviewer who you probably already follow, or at least you should. Go on, go over there and click the Follow button, I’ll wait.

 

So basically this is one of those “Do a thing and then get 11 others to do a thing” lists which in general I have avoided in life but… well, it’s free content, this one looked like enough fun that I could enjoy it and I get to come up with a bunch of questions at the end so let’s see how this goes.

sunshine.jpg

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leebutler Editorial

DC Did What Marvel Didn’t

For the last decade, Marvel has basically owned the cinema landscape. Since the release of Iron Man, they have never left the top 10 highest grossing films list of each year, the only exception being in 2009 when they didn’t release a film (remember when there was a year that didn’t have a Marvel film? Memories). In all that time they have proven to dominate the cultural conversation around movies, and recently they even added an Oscar to the collection of things they pulled off. But there is one thing that they didn’t pull off yet, that their competitor DC just pulled off with Shazam! and I’m in the mood to talk about that. The catch is, in order to talk about it I have to spoil a few things so if you haven’t seen Shazam! then be warned, I’m spoiling a lot of major moments that you’re going to want to see so this is where you abandon this editorial discussion and go see the film, then come back because I require validation.

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leebutler Editorial

Oscar Predictions – 2019

So, this year’s Oscars are going to be a complete farce aren’t they? I mean, have you all been following how everything’s been going over there? With them cutting categories from the broadcast then putting them back in and not having a host because they decided that it wasn’t important enough to hire a new one when their last one quit because he refused to say “I’m sorry” when it came out that he’d made homophobic statements that technically count as jokes because he didn’t mean them (because that’s a joke now, apparently). Oh and then there’s the stuff about them nominating a film made by an accused sex offender,  one of the directors being kind of called out for flashing people on set, then there was the stuff about them not showing all the Best Original Song nominees until they got serious backlash from everyone, including Lin Manuel Miranda who literally wrote one of the songs that weren’t going to be performed… yeah, this ceremony is going to be a mess and because it’s going to be a mess, it’s time to be messy and pick who I, someone with no influence whatsoever, think should get each one of these formerly-prestigious awards that are now basically glorified advertisements for movies that they want people to go see and not an actual display of what would be considered “Best” of anything… I’M BITTER, IN CASE YOU CAN’T TELL!

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leebutler Editorial

The Top 10 Best Films of 2018

Another year has come and gone, the first time I’ve been doing this for a full year (Albiet in bursts) and this has been really nice. Final year of University was good, this year I had 10K views on this blog and while that’s not a lot to some, it means a ton to me. Even when I was sitting through films I hated, I was loving that I got to do this and try and explain why you should or shouldn’t see them even if there were times that my explanations were not well worded (Working on that is my new years resolution). But, as is tradition with reviewers there are now lists to make and this list is the ‘Best’ list (AKA just the ones I liked the most but no one ever admits to that openly because ‘best’ is the term people serarch for, even though calling something ‘best’ is a very bad term for a subjective artform like film). Before we get to that, here’s the parameters for the lists we’ll be doing.

  • I did not see every film. I saw a fair few of them and was seeing them since the start of the year but thanks to final year of Uni stuff, I missed some because doing assignments came over going to movies so if something from isn’t on the list that probably should be, there’s your first potential reason.
  • Only films released in Australia in 2018 are going to be on this list. Specifically films need to have a wide release, wide enough that I can get to see them at a massive chain cinema like Event. Festival screenings are nice and all but they do not help me in this situation becuase, at the moment, I’m not paid for this. So this means films like If Beale Street Could Talk, Mary Poppins Returns, Green Book and The Hate U Give and are not eligible because, while they may have had screenings before the end of the year that I just couldn’t get too, they didn’t have a proper wide release. They’ll be eligible for the 2019 list and hopefully by then maybe Hollywood will stop being idiots and just release a movie worldwide on the same day instead of making some countries wait 3 months and then wonder why there’s piracy. Basically, if there isn’t a review on this blog about it, I didn’t see it.
  • Netflix films are totally eligible for both lists. Indeed any video on demand movie is available for scrutiny, no matter how they had to release it. If they sent it out to be viewed by an audience, then they should be ready for critique.
  • These are merely my opinions and you are absolutely entitled to disagree with me for any reason, go nuts, make your own list in the comments or question my order. That’s fine. What’s not fine is just saying “Your list sucks” with no reason behind it, critique is fine but blind attacks with no reason isn’t. Again, just my opinion.

With that said, before we get to the list, I have several honorable mentions, because this year was so good that I couldn’t be restrained to just one

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