Year: 2018

Predictions for the 90th Annual Academy Awards

These are my Oscar predictions. During the ceremony tomorrow night, as I’ve done for the past couple of years, I’ll be live-tweeting the winners of the 2017 Endy Awards, the nominees for which can be found here. Follow along on twitter @TheEndofCinema.

BEST PICTURE

Call Me by Your Name
Darkest Hour
Dunkirk
The Florida Project
Get Out
I, Tonya
Lady Bird
The Post
The Shape of Water
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

BEST DIRECTOR

Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan
Get Out, Jordan Peele
Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig
Phantom Thread, Paul Thomas Anderson
The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro

BEST ACTOR

Timothée Chalamet, Call Me by Your Name
Daniel Day-Lewis, Phantom Thread
Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out
Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour
Denzel Washington, Roman J. Israel, Esq.

BEST ACTRESS

Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water
Frances McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Margot Robbie, I, Tonya
Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird
Meryl Streep, The Post

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project
Woody Harrelson, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Richard Jenkins, The Shape of Water
Christopher Plummer, All the Money in the World
Sam Rockwell, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Mary J. Blige, Mudbound
Allison Janney, I, Tonya
Lesley Manville, Phantom Thread
Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird
Octavia Spencer, The Shape of Water

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

The Big Sick
Get Out
Lady Bird
The Shape of Water
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Call Me by Your Name
The Disaster Artist
Logan
Molly’s Game
Mudbound

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Blade Runner 2049
Darkest Hour
Dunkirk
Mudbound
The Shape of Water

BEST FILM EDITING

Baby Driver
Dunkirk
I, Tonya
The Shape of Water
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS

Blade Runner 2049
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
Kong: Skull Island
Star Wars: The Last Jedi
War for the Planet of the Apes

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN

Beauty and the Beast
Blade Runner 2049
The Darkest Hour
Dunkirk
The Shape of Water

BEST COSTUME DESIGN

Beauty and the Beast
Darkest Hour
Phantom Thread
The Shape of Water
Victoria & Abdul

BEST MAKEUP & HAIRSTYLING

Darkest Hour
Victoria & Abdul
Wonder

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

Dunkirk
Phantom Thread
The Shape of Water
Star Wars: The Last Jedi
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

BEST ORIGINAL SONG

“Mighty River,” Mudbound
“Mystery of Love,” Call Me by Your Name
“Remember Me,” Coco
“Stand Up for Something,” Marshall
“This is Me,” The Greatest Showman

BEST SOUND EDITING

Baby Driver
Blade Runner 2049
Dunkirk
The Shape of Water
Star Wars: The Last Jedi

BEST SOUND MIXING

Baby Driver
Blade Runner 2049
Dunkirk
The Shape of Water
Star Wars: The Last Jedi

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

The Boss Baby
Breadwinner
Coco
Ferdinand
Loving Vincent

BEST DOCUMENTARY

Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
Faces Places
Icarus
Last Men In Aleppo
Strong Island

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

A Fantastic Woman
The Insult
Loveless
On Body and Soul
The Square

BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT SUBJECT

Edith+Eddie
Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405
Heroin(e)
Knife Skills
Traffic Stop

BEST LIVE ACTION SHORT

DeKalb Elementary
The Eleven O’Clock
The Silent Child
All of Us
My Nephew Emmett

BEST ANIMATED SHORT

Dear Basketball
Garden Party
Negative Space
Lou
Revolting Rhymes

This Week in Rankings

thedayafter_finecut-h_2017

Since the last update I finished rewatching (almost) all of Hong Sangsoo’s films for an article about his career that I wrote for frame.land. I also wrote about most of the films as I watched them, the reviews that went up after the last update are: Woman on the Beach, Night and Day, Like You Know It All, Hahaha, The Day He Arrives, Our Sunhi, and The Day After. Those and all my older Hong reviews (all now freshly revised), along with several new shorter reviews, are indexed at The Chinese Cinema.

Also at The Chinese Cinema I finished revising and reformatting all my reviews for Pantheon Directors along with half of the Far Side of Paradise category, along with Fellow Traveller Apichatpong Weerasethakul. I also have a new review of Johnny Mak’s Long Arm of the Law and Soi Cheang’s The Monkey King 3.

The Monkey King review is also at Seattle Screen Scene, where I also wrote about Clint Eastwood’s The 15:17 to Paris, the documentary The Paris Opera and Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s animated Mary and the Witch’s Flower.

For Mubi I reviewed the new restoration of King Hu’s Legend of the Mountain, and my February Contemporary Chinese Cinema column was on A Better Tomorrow 2018.

If you like what I do here or at Seattle Screen Scene, The Chinese Cinema, or anywhere else, please consider donating at my kofi page. Every little bit helps.

These are the movies I’ve watched or rewatched over the last few weeks, and where they place on my year-by-year rankings.

Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks) – 1, 1938
The Clan of the White Lotus (Lo Lieh) – 32, 1980
The Long Arm of the Law (Johnny Mak) – 14, 1984
The Killer (John Woo) – 2, 1989
Hard-Boiled (John Woo) – 4, 1992

Full Contact (Ringo Lam) – 15, 1992
Crime Story (Kirk Wong) – 32, 1993
Needing You… (Johnnie To & Wai Ka-fai) – 16, 2000
Wu Yen (Johnnie To & Wai Ka-fai) – 27, 2001
Fat Choi Spirit (Johnnie To & Wai Ka-fai) – 11, 2002
Princess D (Sylvia Chang) – 17, 2002

Woman on the Beach (Hong Sangsoo) -24, 2006
Night and Day (Hong Sangsoo) – 12, 2008
Like You Know It All (Hong Sangsoo) – 12, 2009
Lost in the Mountains (Hong Sangsoo) – 18, 2009
Oki’s Movie (Hong Sangsoo) – 1, 2010

Hahaha (Hong Sangsoo) – 12, 2010
Gallants (Derek Kwok & Clement Cheng) – 25, 2010
The Day He Arrives (Hong Sangsoo) – 5, 2011
In Another Country (Hong Sangsoo) – 13, 2012
Our Sunhi (Hong Sangsoo) – 12, 2013
The Grandmaster (Wong Kar-wai) – 13, 2013

Nobody’s Daughter Haewon (Hong Sangsoo) – 17, 2013
50:50 (Hong Sangsoo) – 38, 2013
Hill of Freedom (Hong Sangsoo) – 7, 2014
The Monkey King (Soi Cheang) – 100, 2014
Detective Chinatown (Chen Sicheng) – 27, 2015

Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong Sangsoo) – 31, 2015
Yourself and Yours (Hong Sangsoo) – 2, 2016
The Monkey King 2 (Soi Cheang) – 55, 2016
On the Beach at Night Alone (Hong Sangsoo) – 4, 2017
The Day After (Hong Sangsoo) – 27, 2017

Pumpkin Movie (Sophy Romvari) – 33, 2017
Manhunt (John Woo) – 43, 2017
The Shape of Water (Guillermo del Toro) – 65, 2017
Mary and the Witch’s Flower (Hiromasa Yonebayashi) – 69, 2017
The Greatest Showman (Michael Gracey) – 85, 2017
The Paris Opera (Jean-Stéphane Bron) – 91, 2017

The 15:17 to Paris (Clint Eastwood) – 1, 2018
The Monkey King 3 (Soi Cheang) – 2, 2018
The Commuter (Jaume Collet-Serra) – 3, 2018
A Better Tomorrow (Ding Sheng) – 4, 2018
Monster Hunt 2 (Raman Hui) – 5, 2018
The Cloverfield Paradox (Julius Onah) – 6, 2018

This Week in Rankings

RainingintheMountain2.jpg

The end of the year came and went since the last rankings update, which meant a handful of round-up posts here at The End: Books (and Other Words), Film Discoveries, and Endy Award Nominations.

At Seattle Screen Scene I reviewed The Post, The Last Jedi, The Disaster Artist, Pitch Perfect 3, Downsizing, Hostiles, and Goldbuster. We also recorded a couple episodes of The Frances Farmer Show: one on The Last Jedi and one a 2017 Year-in-Review.

At Frame.land, I wrote about the films of Chang Cheh and contributed a brief review of Private Eye Blues. At Mubi, I launched a column on Contemporary Chinese Cinema. The first two are on 2017 in Chinese Film and the pair of Youth and The Thousand Faces of Dunjia.

I wrote some brief year-end stuff at other sites as well: Double Features for Mubi, Cinematic Moments (Claire’s Camera) and Underseen Movies (Our Time Will Come) for Frame.land, and about On the Beach at Night Alone for InReview Online’s Year in Review. This year we of the Seattle Film Critics Society gave out our first official awards, which named Get Out Best Picture and somehow didn’t nominate Baahubali: The Conclusion for anything at all.

Over at The Chinese Cinema, I’ve been rewatching all of Hong Sangsoo’s films in chronological order and reviewing them along the way. So far I have reviews up for The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well, The Power of Kangwon Province, Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate, Woman is the Future of Man  and Tale of Cinema. I’ve revised all of my previous writing about Hong Sangsoo and indexed it, and done the same for my writing about King Hu. I also reviewed Evan Yang’s Sun, Moon and Star and Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai’s Running on Karma. My The Chinese Cinema List at letterboxd is up-to-date with 434 titles as well. And I also made a list of Shu Qi’s movies.

If you like what I do here or at Seattle Screen Scene, The Chinese Cinema, or anywhere else, please consider donating at my kofi page. Every little bit helps.

These are the movies I’ve watched or rewatched over the last few weeks, and where they place on my year-by-year rankings.

Sun, Moon and Star (Evan Yang) – 19, 1961
A Charlie Brown Christmas (Bill Melendez) – 4, 1965
Legend of the Mountain (King Hu) – 3, 1979
Raining in the Mountain (King Hu) – 11, 1979
Dance of the Drunken Mantis (Yuen Woo-ping) – 25, 1979

The Miracle Fighters (Yuen Woo-ping) – 3, 1982
Return of the Jedi (Richard Marquand) – 12, 1983
Drunken Tai Chi (Yuen Woo-ping) – 45, 1984
Flirting (John Duigan) – 12, 1991
In the Heat of the Sun (1994) – 4, 1994

The Day a Pig Fell into the Well (Hong Sansgoo) – 31, 1996
The Dream Factory (Fen Xiaogang) – 37, 1997
The Power of Kangwon Province (Hong Sangsoo) – 16, 1998
Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (Hong Sansgoo) – 7, 2000
Bring It On (Peyton Reed) – 20, 2000

On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate (Hong Sangsoo) – 4, 2002
Running on Karma (Johnnie To & Wai Ka-fai) – 1, 2003
Woman is the Future of Man (Hong Sangsoo) – 37, 2004
Tale of Cinema (Hong Sangsoo) – 8, 2005
Assembly (Feng Xiaogang) – 28, 2007

If You are the One 2 (Feng Xiaogang) – 37, 2010
Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson) – 3, 2014
The Force Awakens (JJ Abrams) – 29, 2015
Rogue One (Gareth Edwards) – 40, 2016
Kedi (Ceyda Torun) – 69, 2016
Citizen Jane (Matt Tyrnauer) – 112, 2016

Mother! (Darren Aronofsky) – 5, 2017
Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig) – 6, 2017
Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson) – 13, 2017
The Last Jedi (Rian Johnson) – 17, 2017
Downsizing (Alexander Payne) – 21, 2017
The Burden of Other People’s Thoughts (Don Hertzfeldt) – 22, 2017

Lucky (John Carroll Lynch) – 26, 2017
Youth (Feng Xiaogang) – 35, 2017
Kaatru Veliyidai (Mani Ratnam) – 45, 2017
The Work (Jairus McLeary & Gethin Aldous) – 55, 2017
Pitch Perfect 3 (Trish Sie) – 63, 2017
Blade of the Immortal (Takashi Miike) – 70, 2017

Girls Trip (Malcolm D. Lee) – 71, 2017
Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (Griffin Dunne) – 80, 2017
Last Flag Flying (Richard Linklater) – 90, 2017
Goldbuster (Sandra Ng) – 94, 2017
Molly’s Game (Aaron Sorkin) – 96, 2017

Wonder Woman (Patty Jenkins) – 97, 2017
The Thousand Faces of Dunjia (Yuen Woo-ping) – 98, 2017
The Disaster Artist (James Franco) – 103, 2017
I, Tonya (Craig Gillespie) – 106, 2017
The Fate of the Furious (F. Gary Gray) – 107, 2017
Hostiles (Scott Cooper) – 113, 2017