leebutler Editorial

5 Melbourne Documentary Film Festival Films I’m Excited To See

Film Festivals have had a hard go the last few years, having to adapt to the pandemic meant that a lot of them have had to move online. Over the last month I reviewed films for one of those festivals, the Sydney Underground Film Festival, but coming up throughout the month of October is the 6th Annual Melbourne Documentary Film Festival. 

Between the 1st and the 31st of October, the MDFF will be showing over 20 feature-length documentaries and dozens upon dozens of shorts. There’s so much on offer that it’s going to be a challenge to pick what to view… luckily for you, I’ve skimmed through the list and picked 5 documentaries that I’m most looking forward to in order to influence your decisions of where you put your money because that’s the kind of thing I do.

Continue reading “5 Melbourne Documentary Film Festival Films I’m Excited To See” →
leebutler Review

Screench Award Winning Blog

You know, it’s funny that we’re about a week away from the Academy Awards and yet I’m here bragging about the fact that I also have won an award, one I might not have known about were it not for fellow award winner Film-Authority bragging about theirs. A very real case of they showed me theirs so now I’m showing mine, for I too am on the Screench list of best movie critics.

I even get to put this image on my blog, which I will do here and also somewhere else on this page when I figure out how to do that because WordPress editing is hard (it’s partially why I haven’t changed the header, that and I have no design skills and can’t make a good header)

Screench Award
Continue reading “Screench Award Winning Blog” →
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!

Continue reading “Best Performances of 2020” →
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. 

Continue reading “The Top Ten Worst Films of 2020” →
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. 

Continue reading “Oscar Predictions – 2020” →
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

Continue reading “The Top Ten Worst Films of 2019” →
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.

Continue reading “The Top Ten Best Films of 2019” →
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

Continue reading “Sunshine Blogger Award” →