Ranking the Movies of 2018: Week 14

Those who follow this column closely will notice that Ready Player One has dropped on the list. The more I sit with Ready Player One, the more I don’t care for it. I had a reckoning with my feelings about Ready Player One two weeks ago and at that time I felt that the quality of the adventure in Ready Player One was enough for me to give the movie a pass.

Then I read Nathan Rabin’s column on Ready Player One and came to agree with his point about how the movie and the book pander so desperately to geek culture while offering little more than a few cheap thrills. Skillful cheap thrills, he’s still Steven Speilberg after all, but cheap thrills nevertheless. There is a mercenary quality to the references in Ready Player One, as if each reference weren’t an organic choice but a market-tested reference assured to appeal to the core audience being flattered by Ready Player One.

Now that I have addressed my declining opinion of Ready Player One let’s talk new movies. Isle of Dogs is the top debut of the week but it’s not exactly an exciting debut. Wes Anderson’s latest pretentious art project is consistently amusing with a heartwarming story about the love and loyalty between humans and pets but there is an empty quality to the film as well, one where the film has emotion but isn’t fully invested in that emotion.

Rampage is the latest big-budget extravaganza starring the biggest movie star on the planet, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. I am a huge fan of The Rock and he’s not bad in Rampage; in fact, he’s the only good thing about this terrible movie. Rampage should be dumb fun ala Rock’s Fast & Furious movies but instead, Rampage is a tedious exercise in exposition-heavy dialogue and louder than ever sound design that, at the very least, drowns out some of the awful dialogue.

The other new release this week is the foreign relations hostage drama, Beirut starring Jon Hamm. Beirut isn’t bad but the marketing campaign is utterly bizarre. The film was released on a Wednesday with so little fanfare that the film played to thousands of empty seats across the United States. That the film was only competent is part of the answer why people skipped this one but it doesn’t explain why the film was released in theaters at all if the studio wasn’t going to support it.

Our classic on this week’s Everyone’s a Critic Movie Review Podcast was Friday the 13th in honor of the actual Friday the 13th which arrived this past Friday. Unlike the experience I had rewatching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and realizing that it is one of the most thoughtful yet terrifying movies ever made, Friday the 13th only lessens in stature on rewatch.

The emptiness at the core of Friday the 13th undermines the notion that the film was revolutionary in creating the horror tropes of today. In fairness, I can’t deny that the cheap moralizing of Friday the 13th wasn’t significantly influential in the horror genre, the bottom line about Friday the 13th is that it is just a slasher movie with no real significance behind it. The film has a mercenary air that has only become more prominent in the years since its release. The first film capitalized on Halloween and Texas Chainsaw’s bloody impact and every Friday the 13th since adapted to whatever trend was taking place in the genre in a further attempt at cashing in on empty violence.

Next week, Super Troopers and Super Troopers 2 will be joining the rankings as we have named Super Troopers as our “Classic”, heavy quotations on that word, on the show to go with the 4/20 release of Super Troopers 2. Amy Schumer will join the list as well as her new movie I Feel Pretty opens this week and finally a new movie about Human Trafficking called Traffik will also find room on this list.

New rankings below and new additions to the list are in bold type…

1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

2. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

3. Black Swan

4. Phantom Thread

5. Black Panther

6. His Girl Friday

7. Best F®iends

8. Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark

9. Annihilation

10. Unsane

11. Just Charlie

12. Columbus

13. The Death of Stalin

14. Hostiles

15. A Wrinkle in Time

16. Boogie Nights

17. Foxy Brown

18. Becks

19. A Quiet Place

20. Game Night

21. Are We Not Cats

22. The Ballad of Lefty Brown

23. 12 Strong

24. Red Sparrow

25. Act & Punishment

26. Los Angeles Overnight

27. Salome & Wilde Salome

28. Switching Channels

29. Actors of Sound: A Foley Artist Documentary

30. Tomb Raider

31. War Games

32. Ready Player One

33. Insidious: The Last Key

34. Sheik Jackson

35. Gringo

36. Love, Simon

37. Isle of Dogs

38. Hurricane Heist

39. Samson & Delilah

40. Heat

41. Hell’s House

42. The Last Movie Star

43. The Miracle Season

44. Blockers

45. Early Man

46. Almost Paris

47. Bloodsport

48. Reds

49. Play Misty for Me

50. Frantic

51. Beirut

52. 7 Days in Entebbe

53. Taffin

54. Samson

55. Friday the 13th

56. Rampage

57. Last House on the Left

58. Burnt Offerings

59. Paddington 2

60. Pacific Rim Uprising

61. Sherlock Gnomes

62. Chappaquiddick

63. Cloverfield Paradox

64. Peter Rabbit

65. Proud Mary

66. The Mist

67. God’s Not Dead: A Light in the Darkness

68. Den of Thieves

69. Death Wish 1974

70. Death Wish 2018

71. The Commuter

72. Fifty Shades Freed

73. Winchester: The House That Ghosts Built

74. Midnight Sun

75. Forever My Girl

76. Every Day

77. Strangers Prey at Night

78. 15:17 to Paris

79. Truth or Dare

80. The Greasy Strangler

81. Maze Runner: The Death Cure