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2022 Annual Recap

Pictured: The movie that felt like it was most made for me personally in 2022, Snow Day (only reviewed in 2023).

2022 at the Movies

This year was my first time going back to the theater since the pandemic, and I saw a lot of good ones plus a few bricks. The biggest theme that emerged for me was “movies about movies”: The Fabelmans, Babylon, Pearl, Empire of Light, Nope, and The Bubble were all “love letters to cinema” (or, in some cases, “hate mail to cinema”), while Aftersun, X, Scream, and Everything Everywhere All At Once were centrally about something else but had film itself as a major part of the story. Meanwhile, a bunch of films were indirectly about the state of movies and movie discourse, including, Tar, Top Gun: Maverick, and The Menu. That’s a lot of high-profile meta-cinema!

On the topic of blockbusters: None of 2022’s three highest-grossing films were superhero movies. That’s only happened a couple times in the past decade. Credit both the encroaching malaise towards comic book movies — especially Marvel burnout — and the massive success of Avatar: The Way of Water and Top Gun: Maverick. I haven’t seen Ava-two, but Maverick is great! (Jurassic World 3 limped to a billion, but I have no interest in that.)

And from a “prestige film” perspective, 2022 had a solid showing. I like nearly every Best Picture nominee. This feels like a major accomplishment for the Academy Awards, which is as famous for getting it wrong as getting it right.

Here’s looking at a promising 2023!

2022 on the Site

I have been writing reviews and recording podcasts consistently since 2020, but this was the year I took the step of putting it all under “The Goods” banner. I officially kicked off the site’s “wide release” in July. I spent the second half of the year keeping a daily review streak alive. I undertook a few actor/director/series retrospectives (see “Review Projects” below). Check out my 2023 Goals for a peek ahead to this year.

2022 on the Podcast

The Goods: A Film Podcast published weekly episodes through the duration of 2022. We completed two theme months: Young Adult Novel Adaptations Months (aka “YAM”) (February) and Non-Disney Pre-1990 Animation (aka “Animonth”) (September). We passed the 100-episode mark and did a countdown of our 100 favorite films to celebrate. We started doing top-5 lists every now and then. And the train keeps rolling next year!

2022 Films in Review
Masterpieces Reviewed
Review Projects
Site Milestones
Monthly Recaps
Some Numbers
  • The Goods published 308 film reviews in 2022
    • Note: About one third of those have been downgraded to “Capsule” length as I settled on a 400-word threshold, higher than my previous 250-word threshold, to be a “Review.” The current number of 2022 posts still marked as “Reviews” is 206.
    • The average “Is It Good?” rating for those reviews was a 5.13, just a hair above “Good”
  • The Goods rated 369 films in total, including reviews, capsules, and podcast episodes
    • The average “Is It Good?” rating of those films was a 5.01, almost exactly a “Good”
  • The Goods had 591 readers in 2022 (starting with the July 9 launch). Thanks for stopping by, friends!
  • And those readers left 98 comments! (Well, a lot of them were me.) Thanks especially to Hunter from Kinemalogue and my old pal Nate for being 2022’s most frequent commenters
  • The Goods: A Film Podcast released 52 episodes (counting bonus episodes, spectaculars, and multi-part episodes as separate episodes in that tally).
  • According to my Letterboxd, I watched 378 feature-length films and 46 short films in 2022. My goal was 365 features, which is my target for 2023 as well.
A Few Memorable Reviews
  • Rudy (1993)
    • “I view Rudy as a quasi-religious text. I know that probably sounds a little bit silly (maybe not if you’ve ever known any diehard sports fans). But it is something I treated with a reverent devotion. It was my first favorite film, and the one that had the biggest influence on me. It topped every “Favorite Movie” list I made until I was 25 years old. One year, when prompted with identifying my favorite films on a personal survey, I wrote: “Rudy… now and forever,” as if it were a gospel. The Book of Ruettiger.”
  • A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)
    • “We all find ourselves spiritually eroded during the winter months. Most people cope by putting on displays and buying trinkets. Charlie Brown sees the hollow spectacle of holiday season for what it is, and Linus reminds him (and us) that true healing comes from something deeper. There’s something within the human spirit that keeps us persevering even when the days get cold and short and hope is lost. That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”
  • Mulholland Dr. (2001)
    • “In a traditional narrative, as the film builds to its climax, we expect threads to come together and revelations to answer more questions than they ask. But this is the opposite of what happens in Mulholland Drive: the longer the film goes, the more it dissociates into dream logic and surreality.”
  • Dazed and Confused (1993)
    • “Of all of the elements that bring life to the film, none is more important than the soundtrack. If there’s a film that uses music better than Dazed and Confused, then… well, it’s probably American Graffiti. But if this movie isn’t quite so formally inventive with its use of musical diegesis as American Graffiti, it goes even further to construct a distinct texture for each scene with its music. Just like it’s impossible to imagine the opening Star Wars text crawl without John Williams’ soaring anthem — so, e.g., the lovely Emporium scene is not itself without “Hurricane.””
  • Teen Beach Movie (2013)
    • “The next layer is where Teen Beach Movie goes from kind of fun and charming to genuinely clever. For as much as this movie operates on a textual level, it is simply brimming with subtext. It’s pretty well documented that Disney-created media is partially responsible for (or, more generously, a mirror of) culturally codified and reductive gender roles. Teen Beach Movie subversively pulls the rug out from these norms. The point of this movie is not simply that boys can like romantic musicals or girls can be intelligent, pragmatic skeptics. Teen Beach Movie, instead, argues for happiness in balance and self-actualization: To be a true feminist is to let each woman decide their own identity, even if it’s a girly-girl who bakes pies to impress boys.”
  • The Social Network (2010)
    • “This, to me, is why The Social Network is a capital-G Great film. It’s not simply a terrifically entertaining, perfectly constructed drama (though it certainly is), but that the story is a reflection of a fundamental shift of the way the humans communicate and relate with each other. We are more social, more networked, but less connected. Our lives are captured in ones and zeroes on social media, our existence distilled to uploads and likes.”
Looking Ahead

 

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