Five Favorite Christmas Movies

One of the many traditions associated with the holiday season is the viewing of Christmas movies. I've got a group of friends who get together every Monday leading up to the big day to watch a few of the classics. I have found, though, that while I love the Christmas season and most of the stuff that comes with it, I don’t love a lot of the traditional holiday classics. I’ve never been overly impressed with It’s a Wonderful Life or White Christmas, have soured on Christmas Vacation over the last decade, and have always loathed A Christmas Story. I do have a few favorites, however; a set of movies that I’m sure to mix in with the classic holiday specials and The Office Christmas episodes every year. Here are my top five.  

5. The Santa Clause (1994)
I liked this movie well enough as a kid then mostly forgot about it for 20 years. Then, when my son got super into Christmas a few years back (as kids are delightfully wont to do), I threw this movie on and it’s remained a stalwart of our Christmas rotation ever since. Santa Clause has a strong conceit, a few jokes that work for adults, and a classic “rediscovering the spirit of Christmas” storyline that feels genuine rather than forced.

4. Love Actually (2003)
A solid romantic-comedy with a Christmas background, Love Actually also qualifies as one of my favorite chick-flicks of all time. The interweaving of the lives of the ensemble cast is excellent and the realistic good feeling of the movie allows you to look past the far-fetched connections and questionable relationships. Is it weird that the future Rick from The Walking Dead quietly lets his best friend’s wife know that he’s into her? Yes. Does it bother me within the movie? Nah, not really. We get some stellar performances as well, particularly from perpetually overlooked Liam Neeson. And there's always something awesome about an (almost) all British cast. Hugh Grant for life.

3. Elf (2003)
I have found that there is a large anti-Elf contention out there trying to keep Elf-awareness down, but I will not be silenced. Here's how great Elf is: I know lots of people (some family members included) who hate Will Ferrell. HATE him. To a man, those haters will happily sit and watch Elf any time it comes on TV. Likewise, lifelong Ferrell that I am, I would call this one of my favorite Ferrell movies. Just like Caine in The Muppet Christmas Carol, Ferrell absolutely goes ALL OUT for his role in a children's movie and that performance makes the film. There’s an infectious energy to this movie that jives well with the feeling of the holiday season, too, and I love it for that.

2. The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)
Am I correct in assuming that no one doesn't like the Muppets? There's no one out there with a secret vendetta against Kermit or Fozzy, right? (Editor’s note: I know one person who doesn’t like the Muppets and I do not trust him, obviously.) Because no matter how old I get, the Muppets still hold some awesomeness for me. While all the Muppet movies are good, The Muppet Christmas Carol is, in my opinion, the crowning achievement of the pre-Jason Segel franchise. It's a wonderful blend of music, classic literature, and general silliness capped off by a surprisingly strong performance by Michael Caine. Caine, who's been known to take a paycheck and mail in a performance from time to time, plays Ebenezer Scrooge like he's in a big-time stage adaptation of the Dickens novel. Just absolutely goes all in for a kid's movie starring a puppet and you gotta love that.

1. Home Alone (1989)
Absolutely no question in my mind that this is the best holiday movie of all-time. If I see a Christmas movie list like this and it doesn't contain Home Alone, I scoff in anger and immediately disregard its validity. Whether watching alone, with a group, or with my kid, there are numerous moments that make me laugh out loud despite the fact that I've seen this movie upwards of 50 times. I LOVE it. Home Alone is INSANELY quotable, too, with a litany of lines that I can and do quote in everyday life. As I've gotten older my viewing of Home Alone has changed some and I appreciate different elements. For instance, the Wet Bandits’ plot, I think, is genius and the Bandits themselves are incredible characters. Pesci and Stern just CRUSH those roles. “Maybe he killed himself” is one of the funniest lines of the movie and Stern delivers it with such earnestness. Knowing that the scene with Candy and O’Hara in the back of the Budget van is completely improvised, too, adds to my great appreciation for the film. And as I get older, I feel the pain of Kevin’s attacks on Marv and Harry so much more deeply. My son loves this movie so much that we have to put a limit on the number of times he can watch it in one holiday season and then won’t let him watch it between New Year’s and Thanksgiving. Even still, it remains my absolute favorite and a true hallmark of the holidays around our house.

10 Worst TV Pilots (2013-present)

We’ve just wrapped our viewing and recaps on the 2019 TV Pilots. Despite the typically lean offerings of the networks, this year wasn’t really that bad, thanks in large part to the bevy of new streaming shows I was able to sprinkle in amongst the rabble. But when I began the arduous process of sifting through each of the fall’s new shows (30 in all, bless my heart), I thought about the sheer number of pilots I’ve watched in the six years of Mad About Movies and which of these episodes were the worst of the worst. Here are the ten pilots that jump out, the ones I still remember and have possibly been scarred by, since we did our first pilots episode way back in 2013.

HONORABLE MENTIONS: God Friended Me (CBS, 2018), Bad Judge (NBC, 2014), Wisdom of the Crowd (CBS, 2017), Lucky Seven (ABC, 2013), Kevin Can Wait (CBS, 2016)

10. The Great Indoors (CBS, 2016)
I’m not saying The Great Indoors ruined Joel McHale’s career. But I am saying The Great Indoors was so bad, and so poorly conceived, that we all collectively decided, “Eh, that’s probably enough Joel McHale for a while.” In defense of Joel, it was pretty clear he took this gig so he could buy a vacation home in Honolulu or something and I, for one, respect the cash grab.

9. The Good Doctor (ABC, 2017)
People I know and trust really like The Good Doctor and swear to me that it’s gotten good. I am willing to acknowledge this is possible. I, however, could not get over the pilot’s premise which seemed to be, “People on the spectrum actually have superpowers!” Representation matters! GOOD representation matters even more!

8. Stalker (CBS, 2014)
The first of two Dylan McDermott or possibly Dermot Mulroney (who could even know which it was) joints to make my list, Stalker played less like the edgy cop drama it intended to be and more like a how-to for potential sex criminals. Probably not the BEST approach for ensuring long-term success, especially on CBS.

7. Welcome to the Neighborhood (CBS, 2018)
Obviously, there have been worse pilots over the years, but few have made me cringe as hard or as frequently as Neighborhood. The “jokes” were so bad, and so predictable, that I found myself pre-cringing and saying out loud, to myself, “Please don’t say i- gahhhhh, he said it.” Maybe, just maybe, CBS sitcoms aren’t the BEST place for handling issues like gentrification and race relations but what do I know.  

6. LA to Vegas (FOX, 2017)
The only funny thing about this pilot, and the six or so episodes that followed before its inevitable cancellation, was the feeling that every single person on screen, from the extras to Dylan McDermott/Dermot Mulroney, knew they were on a sinking ship. There’s not one hint of optimism in this episode, like the cast held a meeting before the first table read and all agreed, “We will all be free of this commitment by Halloween.”

5. A Million Little Things (ABC, 2018)
The first show to really grab hold of the This is Us vibe and run it fully into the ground, A Million Little Things is trying SO HARD to make you cry that it almost immediately begins to feel like a threat. “If you don’t cry,” declared the ABC executive. “I will waterboard your dog.” I don’t care for the emotional terrorism of This is Us but at least it’s well-written. NOT SO MUCH with this one. 

4. Mulaney (FOX, 2014)
Oof, this one still hurts a bit. John Mulaney is one of the funniest comedians ever and a particular favorite of mine. Add in Martin Freaking Short and what could possibly go wrong with this fresh take on Seinfeld? Turns out a lot. A. LOT. Could go wrong.

3. Mixology (ABC, 2014)
Do you like reprehensible characters without a single redeeming quality among the entire group? Do you like when a show takes said reprehensible, irredeemable characters and tries to redeem them but does so mockingly? How do you feel about the implication of date rape? Well, have I got a show for you…

2. Inhumans (ABC, 2017)
It’s fair to say the Marvel TV shows haven’t gone quite as well as Disney/Marvel would’ve hoped. But the mediocre returns on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D and the rest pale in comparison to the disaster of Inhumans. Nothing, literally nothing, about Inhumans makes sense in the pilot and while there have been plenty of shows over the years that were confusing up front and asked their viewers to go along for the journey (See: Lost and every Lost knock-off to come along since 2004), there are very few that are as stupid and poorly-written as this one. It was DOA and audiences knew it.  

1. The Mysteries of Laura (NBC, 2014)
Five years on and I’m still blown away by the premise for Laura which is, essentially, “This woman has a career AND a family, whhhhhhaaaattttttttt???” If the exceedingly stupid and tone-deaf “concept” weren’t bad enough, the writing within the pilot was physically painful. The only real mystery (*sunglasses emoji*) here is how this trainwreck got 38 episodes before cancellation.

Five Favorite Horror Movies

Listeners of the show know that I very much do not enjoy the horror genre. I do not like to be scared. This is, I think, a big aspect in the enjoyment of the genre: the thrill of being afraid in a manufactured, safe kind of way. For me, it is less “thrill” and more “welp, now I can’t sleep for a week, coolcoolcool.” Even bad horror movies have a way of sticking in my brain which, on the one hand, is a great credit to the filmmaker but on the other, PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONE AND LET ME GET SOME REST. Regardless, while I don’t partake in the horror genre at large and stay away from witches, demons, and torture stuff wholesale, there are a few horror movies (though perhaps much of my list could be classified more as “scary movies” than “horror” which I’m cool with) that have made their way into my line of sight for which I have great admiration, appreciation, and possibly even (in a case or two) love.

5. 28 Days Later (2002)
The movie that gets the credit or perhaps the blame for revitalizing the zombie industry, 28 Days Later has one of the best opens in horror movie history and carries that promise through its runtime. I’m always hit-or-miss on Danny Boyle and while he likely has better movies in his filmography, I think this is the one where his sensibilities work the best. Plus, while the fast zombie bit has become tired over the last decade or so, it was horrifyingly fresh in 2002.

4. 30 Days of Night (2007)
I don’t like to rely on the terms “overrated” and “underrated” too much because it presumes that the opinions of only the people I know and talk to can be extrapolated out to the entire world. But, 30 Days of Night is super underrated, and I feel good about saying that in this case because most people reading this list are thinking “What is 30 Days of Night?” or “The…Josh Hartnett vampire movie?” Yeah, that’s right, the Josh Harnett vampire movie. This movie has one of the best horror movie concepts I can remember and Danny Huston’s performance as the vampire boss is outstanding. (But also I never want to see this movie again, thanks.)

3. The Thing (1982)
An absolute classic. Like 30 Days of Night, the concept and setting for The Thing are so effectively creepy that you could almost have no meaningful action and the movie would still leave you on edge. Halloween is great but for me, this is John Carpenter’s finest hour. And, like I always say, no movie has ever been made worse by the inclusion of American Treasure Kurt Russell. The 2011 remake was fine, for what it’s worth, but it was distinctly lacking in the Kurt Russell department.

2. A Quiet Place (2018)
Some will say A Quiet Place, like the next film on my list, isn’t a horror movie but rather a work or suspense or science fiction or some other categorization. For me, however, this is a PERFECT horror movie: extremely tense and nerve-racking but without the sleepless nights and crying in a corner that accompanies many horror flicks that are more viscerally disturbing for big babies like me. A Quiet Place has a great concept and story structure to pair with excellent performances. I saw this movie in a theater with an absurd surround sound speaker setup and seats that shook during the various jump scares and it was an exhilarating if terrifying experience.

1. JAWS (1975)
Another film that you can remove from the horror genre if you so choose but if a horror movie can be judged by its societal effects, there are few that can contend with JAWS, a movie that is responsible for a multi-generational fear of the water. JAWS is a perfect film and Spielberg’s decision (forced upon him by mechanical issues though it may have been) to hold back the reveal of the monster until the final act is the stuff of movie legends. It’s a movie that terrifies me still to this day and yet, every time I watch it, I am unable to look away from the screen.

Rambo Ranks

Prior to this weekend’s release of Last Blood, there were only four Rambo movies. I say this because, while it is a scientific, provable fact thanks to IMDb, it feels like there are way more than four of these things. I thought I was alone in that feeling until recently when my co-host, Richard, made an off-hand comment about how he’d lost track of how many Rambos there are and how it had to be close to double digits at this point. Well, again, it’s not double digits, it’s just four but it doesn’t feel like four. My theory on why the Rambo Cinematic Universe feels so much larger than reality is part the longevity of this series (we’re at 37 years between the first installment and this, ostensibly the last) and part the omnipresence of the character culturally. The Rambo movies might not be that great (see below) but Rambo the character has overshadowed the movies he exists in tenfold and his cultural relevance, while obviously much lower than it was in the 80’s and 90’s, has persisted quite stubbornly. With Sylvester Stallone hanging up the headband (again, ostensibly; we’ll see) with this final chapter in the Rambo saga, I re-visited all ten four of the previous films in the series and ranked them below.  

4. Rambo III, 1988
The end of the trilogy (which absolutely should have been titled Rambo First Blood Part III, you idiots) saw John Rambo pulled into the war in Afghanistan when he was required to go and save Colonel Samuel Trautman after a poorly conceived mission went haywire. There are times when this one works really well (all things considered) and times when Stallone’s notorious hubris is on full display in less-than-stellar fashion. In Stallone’s world, Rambo is personally responsible for the liberation of Afghanistan and I’m not exaggerating much. It also super-duper jumps the shark in the final ten minutes when Rambo and Colonel Trautman LITERALLY face down the Russian army by themselves. 

3. Rambo First Blood Part II, 1985
First of all, not a good title. If we were going with my plan to call the third movie Rambo First Blood Part III then, sure, this title makes sense. Without that kicker, though? Terrible title. Secondly, I’m not 100% sure the plotting in Part II makes, like, ANY sense whatsoever. Rambo and Trautman go back into Vietnam to help a group of government-sanctioned mercenaries track down and rescue American POWs. But wait! Turns out the mercs don’t want to rescue the POWs because…uh…they’re somehow in on the continued incarceration of said POWs? I don’t know, it doesn’t make a lot of sense, and I was very distracted by the fact that all of the mercenaries look like other, more successful 80’s actors and I spent the whole time wondering if one guy was Dr. Johnny Fever from WKRP in Cincinnati (it was not him). John Rambo did rock the crap out of a bazooka, though, so this movie isn’t a complete loss.

2. Rambo, 2008
I remember thinking, “Wait, for real?” when this movie came out a decade back. In hindsight, it made complete and total sense to revisit our hero, we just weren’t yet in a climate where EVERY SINGLE MOVIE was prime for a reboot, remake, sequel, or prequel. Coming out of Rambo, I had two predominant thoughts: One, this wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be and two, boy, things sure have gotten a lot more violent in the 20 years since we last saw Rambo wrecking shop. YOWZA. Even still, this installment is actually solid enough save for a few instances of that legendary Stallone hubris once again raising its ugly head by exploring too many heavy themes and storylines that could’ve been streamlined and dumbed down a bit. You had me at “shoots a bunch of guys with arrows”, Sly, let’s just leave it at that.

1. Rambo First Blood, 1982
The rest of these films have been chasing the success of the first installment, which saw a PTSD-riddled John Rambo returning from Vietnam only to be rejected by the country that sent him off to war in the first place. When he’s hassled by a local sheriff…well, in the words of Ron Burgandy, things escalate quickly, and pretty soon Rambo is shooting dudes out of a helicopter. The films that followed, I think, get more of the credit for launching Rambo the character into his permanent place in the cultural zeitgeist but what sets First Blood apart, in my mind, is that it puts the story forward instead of just the man himself. Other Rambo movies think they have something to say (particularly the most recent reboot) but this one actually had something to say and pulls it off rather decently in the midst of Rambo going ham on an unlucky group of state troopers.

Live Action Nick Toons

Last weekend, the long-anticipated live action Dora the Explorer movie made its debut in theaters worldwide. I say long-anticipated because every day we get between five and 20 emails from listeners DEMANDING this movie. Just kidding, literally no one in the world who is not a creeper has been demanding this movie. Even so, this movie exists and hey, it did well with critics, its representation matters, and it’s genuinely very funny! I didn’t see that coming so kudos to everyone involved. Dora did, however, make me consider what other Nickelodeon cartoons could receive the live-action treatment. Here are my ideas, free of charge for the good people at Nickelodeon.

Rugrats
This movie is a sequel to the original series and finds the Rugrats crew in their early-to-mid thirties. They’re all just living life with their own set of kids who get into their own brand of shenanigans. We could go the Look Who’s Talking route and have established actors do voices for the babies, but I think instead we just drop in on the old gang and see where life has taken them. One of them is very successful, one of them (probably Chuckie, let’s be honest) lives in another Rugrats’ basement, one of them hasn’t kept up with the times and says a lot of wacky stuff that’s borderline offensive in 2019, etc.

Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness
This one is a trick to get kids to watch nature stuff. We just take footage from Planet Earth, its spinoffs and contemporaries, anything featuring a panda bear, and slap Adam West-era Batman logos and effects all over the place literally anytime the panda moves. Even the title card explodes onto the screen with a Jack Black sound-alike yelling, “KUNG FU PANDA!!! LEGENDS OF AWESOMENESS!!!” The movie is 65 minutes long, tops, and at the end, we show a trailer for Planet Earth (“now available on Netflix”) and hope all the kids fall for our scam.

Paw Patrol
My interpretation of Paw Patrol is EXTREMELY dark. Like, imagine Zack Snyder reading the script and squirming a little. The Paw Patrol pups have divided themselves into warring clans and the action makes Game of Thrones feel timid. (I admit all of this is just a ploy to scar my own child into not watching Paw Patrol anymore.) 

Rusty Rivets
This pitch is for a TV series rather than a movie. Rusty Rivets is a relatively new show you may not know about if you don’t have young kids in the target demo. It features a pair of best friends who use their imagination and a DIY attitude to create robots, creatures, etc. My show crosses the Rivets gang over with the Scott Brothers from HGTV’s Property Brothers (and 500 other properties these guys are involved in) and finds the four of them building elaborate treehouses and the like with the help of some of Rusty’s mechanical creations. Also, Ty Pennington from Extreme Makeover: Home Edition shows up from time to time and his wacky ideas really throw a monkey wrench in the planning.

Spongebob Squarepants
I am convinced that 90 percent of Spongebob’s audience is not comprised of children at all but of stoners instead. This movie leans into that hunch with a completely bonkers set and costume design that feels like a bad acid trip playing out on the BBC in 1976. It’s kitschy, campy, and probably horrifying but a certain crowd LOVES it and it becomes a massive cult hit, guaranteed.

X-Men Movie Rankings

I wasn’t big into superheroes growing up. I knew the standards (Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, etc.) and had some toys but, as far as pop culture stuff goes, I was far more interested in Star Wars and then Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. That changed significantly when I was nine with the introduction of ­X-Men: The Animated Series into the FOX Saturday morning cartoon lineup. I was immediately hooked on the series, on the universe, and on the characters. I cared about the X-Men and the situations they found themselves in thrilled me. It was the first show I remember that took its young audience seriously and treated us like the semi-responsible teenagers we would soon become. As a result, I read some of the X-Men comics, fell even more in love with the world, and later, I followed the production of the first movie with an intensity only rivaled by my anticipation for Phantom Menace (*sad Price is Right horn*). This is my favorite superhero movie franchise and no matter how good or bad the Marvel and DC movies are, I’m always more excited about a good X-Men movie and more disappointed by a bad X-Men movie than anything coming from the other franchises. With Dark Phoenix opening to miserable reviews this weekend and the Disney merger now a done deal, this chapter of the X-Men is closing and thus, I felt it time to look back on the franchise and rank the movies that make up this universe. 

NOTE: I went back and forth on whether the Deadpool movies and the various Wolverine movies should be included in this discussion. Ultimately, I think they belong though there’s a case to be made that these movies are X-Men-adjacent not X-Men-proper.

11. Last Stand (2005)
There are some good elements in Last Stand but the vast majority of them come down to the success of the previous films in the trilogy. “Do you like X-Men movies? Well this sure is an X-Men movie!” seems to be the tagline. Losing Bryan Singer’s direction (he left to make Superman Returns) is one thing; replacing him with Brett Ratner’s big bag of nothing was quite another. Ratner took the helm of a franchise on the brink of superhero domination and rammed it into the ground on takeoff. Lazy writing, an absurdly overstuffed story, and a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes the X-Men great are just a few highlights of the mess that is Last Stand.

10. Apocalypse (2016)
Apocalypse is probably better than at least the next film on this list but it’s also far more disappointing. Coming off of First Class and Days of Future Past, it seemed like the X-Men series had finally found its groove. With Singer in the director’s chair (making this the first X-Men movie since X2 that was directed by the same director of the previous film) and a cast that included some rising young stars and Oscar Isaac, Apocalypse felt like a sure thing…until it very much was not a sure thing. The story is muddled, the acting is, frankly, quite bad, and the promise of the cast is squandered. As a huge X-Men fan, this is probably one of the five or ten most disappointing movies of my life.

9. Origins: Wolverine (2009)
It is impossible to defend Origins as an actual good movie. It is very much not a good movie. Moreover, it failed the relaunch the X-Men brand post-Last Stand and even led to the scrapping of a series of planned Origins spin-offs. I acknowledge all of this while also acknowledging that, even still, it’s a very watchable movie for me. Maybe it’s a guilty pleasure, maybe it just scratched the X-Men itch and brought to life one of the more interesting storylines from the comics/animated series, or maybe it’s because Gambit appears in the form of my beloved Taylor Kitsch/Tim Riggins. Whatever the case may be, each time I watch Origins (and I have watched it far more times than I’d care to admit), I think, “Gosh that was bad but yeah, I’m definitely going to watch it again sometime.”

8. The Wolverine (2013)
This second attempt at a Wolverine spinoff is, for me, the exact opposite of Origins: It’s a competent, well-made film that I never even think about watching. I was underwhelmed in my first viewing and I’ve never gotten past that feeling in either of my subsequent viewings. Honestly, I sometimes forget it exists, especially in a post-Logan world. When I do remember it exists, I’m hard-pressed to remember much about it, good or bad, other than perhaps the action sequence on the train. Wolverine is FINE but it doesn’t have Tim Riggins so how fine is it really?

7. X-Men (2000)
The OG doesn’t get nearly enough credit for laying the groundwork for the myriad superhero movies that have come since 2000. I was supremely pumped for this movie when it came out and it never occurred to me then that it could possibly be anything less than a smash hit but in retrospect, this was a very risky endeavor. There are definitely some bumps within X-Men that likely would’ve been ironed out if it weren’t essentially the first movie of its kind and much of the plot is fairly nonsensical on close inspection. But the fact that it still holds up as a quality superhero flick is a testament to the entire production and it started the franchise out on a very high note.

6. First Class (2011)
Big props are owed to Matthew Vaughn for reinvigorating a franchise that had lost almost all of its cultural relevance in the years since X2. There are gripes to be had with First Class (Montage! Montage! Montage!) but the new cast is superb across the board and Vaughn clearly understood the tone and depth of this universe. It’s a fun movie but it still has teeth and it handles its material with an appropriate level of seriousness. Of the new cast and their character interpretations, Michael Fassbender is particularly brilliant.

5. Deadpool (2016)
Deadpool had been rumored and taken through various production periods so often that by the time it finally debuted, anyone who had followed the project couldn’t help but feel nervous. A friend of mine, a long-time comic reader, literally whispered, “Please be good, please be good” as the lights in our theater dimmed and our screening began. It’s almost as if fans of these comics and this character willed it into a quality movie. It doesn’t hurt that Ryan Reynolds made the PERFECT Wade Wilson and the PERFECT Deadpool, but Tim Miller and FOX deserve a ton of credit for understanding their character and allowing him to be his dirty and unsanitary yet charismatic and charming self on screen.

4. Deadpool 2 (2018)
I know lots of people who found Deadpool 2 to be disappointing compared to the first one. For me, however, I thought it was a great story for highlighting the best elements of the character, the X-Force sequence was magnificent (although hilariously short lived), and as I’ve always said, there is no movie franchise that is not made better by the addition of Josh Brolin. This movie also removed any fear I had about its predecessor being a one-off, lightning in a bottle situation. Now my only question is how effectively the Merc with the Mouth can be incorporated into the X-Men Universe-proper.

3. Days of Future Past (2014)
DoFP isn’t *quite* to the level of, “I think this movie is great and I won’t be hearing any arguments to the contrary” but it’s close. Time travel is always a dicey proposition and the confusing nature of the narrative is both the source of frustration for this movie’s detractors and ultimately the downfall of the franchise as a whole as it moved into Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix. But this was everything I wanted in an X-Men movie, bringing together both parts of the cast and telling a magnificent story with a flair that feels more like the animated series than any other entry from this franchise. I’ve watched this movie perhaps more times than all of the other X-Men movies combined, and I always find it compelling.

2. X2: United (2003)
As mentioned previously, I think the first X-Men is a great achievement in comic book filmmaking. But I thought it was a GREAT movie, maybe even as good as an X-Men movie could possibly be, until X2 dropped in 2003. Then it was like, “Oh. So, THAT’S what a great X-Men movie looks like.” The maturation of the actors in their roles, the introduction of a few new characters, the improvements in shot selection, set pieces, and the like all combine to make X2 not just a great X-Men movie but one of the great, (and now, I think, overlooked) comic book movies ever made.

1. Logan (2017)
The best of the X-Men movies is oddly the least enjoyable, at least for me. I’ve gotten beaten down by the rise of gritty superhero movies, though not because of their edge so much as the often-uninspiring stories they tell. The decision to make this an R-rated feature and to let Wolverine go “Full Wolverine” was an important one, to be sure, but it’s not THE reason it’s so good. Logan sets itself apart from most of its post-Dark Knight contemporaries by telling a strong, compelling story that pairs beautifully with its broken, exhausted hero. Jackman is incredible in this role and he gives the movie all he has left to give but it is his pairings with both Stewart’s addled Professor X and Dafne Keen’s Laura that bolster Logan’s overall quality. Through these relationships, the movie offers redemption to Logan, a character who has literally a century of sins for which to atone, and it does so with equal measures of grace and heartbreaking brutality.

An Interview with John Wick

When my editor gave me the assignment of interviewing John Wick, I considered handing in my resignation on the spot. Setting aside the fact that the man is, let’s face it, terrifying, I questioned whether New York Magazine should be in the business of profiling a man who made a career out of contract killing then made a name for himself out of killing even more people in very public, graphic ways. “He’s basically a war criminal,” I protested. “Nah,” my editor replied. “I think technically to be a war criminal you have to commit horrible crimes in an actual war not just in the streets of New York. He’s more like a vigilante, I think.” I remained hesitant but my seven roommates reminded me that if I didn’t pay my share of the rent this month, they would murder me and pawn my belongings and so, I took the assignment.

We meet at a small, unassuming coffee shop (his choice) in a neighborhood that is somewhere between decrepit and gentrification. I was surprised by the setting, having had myriad interview experiences wherein the subject chose a posh eatery, a hip bar, or, worst of all, a chain restaurant in Time’s Square under the guise of showing off his “Everymanness.” This place (unnamed, again at Mr. Wick’s request) was decidedly devoid of ambiance or atmosphere and I got the distinct impression that Mr. Wick actually patronized the establishment regularly despite its grimy counters and dim lighting.

“I just want the opportunity to set the record straight,” Mr. Wick had said in our brief but pleasant phone conversation to set up the interview. “I know I’ve done some bad things, but those things aren’t who I am you know? I just want people to see that.”

Mr. Wick arrives five minutes after I do, clad in the expected black garments but topped off with a jaunty scarf and a fedora. He orders at the counter on the way to our table and politely extends his hand as I stand. My hand is shaking as I grasp his and he smiles, disarmingly, and I find myself grinning sheepishly, not quite ashamed of the fear that grips my soul in the presence of a cold killer but certainly embarrassed by it, nonetheless. He gestures to the table, we sit, and just as I begin our conversation, my pen runs out of ink.

I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Wick. My pen seems to be faulty. Let me see if I have another in my bag.
Oh, please, use mine. [He produces a beautiful, rather expensive-looking fountain pen from his jacket pocket.] A gift from Helen, my wife, God rest her soul, on our anniversary many years ago.

He slides the pen across the table with a smile.

You..you sure you don’t mind? I’m old school, I like to take notes even when I’m recording but I don’t want to inconvenience you.
No, no, of course I don’t mind, please.

Okay. Well, thank you. First off, Mr. Wick, I-
John. Please. Call me John. Mr. Wick was my father and all that. [Whispering] Actually, between you and me, I have no idea who my father was. I picked the name John Wick on a lark when I was a boy and it just stuck.

He chuckles and gives me a wink as he removes his scarf and sets it on the table.

Oh. I…Yes, John. Of course. Well, John, first off, I feel I must tell you I was hesitant to take this assignment.
Of course, I completely understand. My reputation precedes me and I’m sure you’ve seen some of the footage of my less savory endeavors.

I have. You are…very good at killing people.
[Chuckling in the least menacing way possible] Sure, I am, but, as I said on the phone, that’s not who I am. That was my job for a while and then it was my mission, perhaps even my passion, but no one likes to be pigeonholed by their job or even their hobbies. I also like sports, I read, I dabble in poetry, I’m learning to cook pasta… There’s more to John Wick than just killing criminals.

You…you like sports?
Oh yeah, big time! Big sports guy here!

What sports?
I used to watch a lot of football, but it’s lost some of its luster for me over the years. The concussions and stuff. Baseball was always too boring for me as a kid, but I’ve come to appreciate it as I’ve gotten older. I’ve always been a Knicks fan, of course, though that hasn’t been much fun for, oh, let’s see, the last two decades! [Laughs] Sell the team already, Dolan, for Pete’s sake. More than anything, though, I love English soccer. I wake up early every Saturday and Sunday morning and watch every match. It’s truly a beautiful sport.  

I confess, Mr. W- John, you’re not who I expected you to be. Your interest in sports, your demeanor, even your hat.
You like it? I’m not totally sold on the style of it yet. I’ve never been much of a fashionista. That was Helen’s department. She always picked out the most wonderful black attire for me. I’m still kind of trying to figure out how to do simple things like buying clothes for myself. She handled all of that. 

Our drinks arrive, Mr. Wick thanks the server, and offers his cup to mine in a silent “Cheers.”

Anyway, the hat and the scarf are more camouflage than anything else.

How do you mean?
Well, I’m six-foot-five and I weigh 110 pounds, I dress in all black all the time, and I’ve killed hundreds of people at this point. It’s best to keep a low profile when I’m out and about. Hence, the ensemble.

I was curious about that. Your face has been plastered across every major and minor news outlet all over the world, your crimes are legendary and, again, VERY public, and yet you’re out and about, as you say, instead of locked away in some remote prison. How does that work?
Well, you know, at the end of the day, all of the people I killed were hardened criminals who, frankly, deserved to die. The government could try to pin some of my pre-retirement crimes on me, but they wouldn’t hold up and they know it, I’m very good at killing people, as you say. And, after all, these monsters did kill my dog. My sweet, loving, kind puppy, a gift from my dead wife. Is there any crime worse than killing a dog? Probably not, I’d say. You add all those things together and, honestly, the authorities just leave me alone. I’m much more concerned about the network of assassins and criminals who are constantly on my tail.

Let’s talk about that if you don’t mind. Rumor has it that there is a huge network of assassins who operate worldwide and who live by a shared code of conduct. That can’t possibly be real, right?
Oh, it’s very real and it’s widespread. You have no idea how many people you interact with in your everyday life who are connected to the network in one way or another. Especially in New York. Just yesterday my barber, a man I’ve known for a decade, tried to slice my throat while I was in his chair. I can’t even say I feel betrayed, I get it, with the rent like it is, who doesn’t need a side hustle? 

Could you go into more details about the network itself and the governing body, something called The Table?
I could but, frankly, you don’t want me to do that. It would only draw attention to you and that’s not something you want, trust me. Someday I’ll write a memoir but currently I’m far more interested in bringing down The Table. That and, of course, working on my Soundcloud.

Your what now?
My Soundcloud.

You have a Soundcloud?
Oh, yes. I’m surprised you don’t know that! That sounds arrogant, wow. Excuse me. I just mean, I feel like people talk to me about my Soundcloud way more than my murdering.

Is it music? Spoken word? A podcast?
I dabble in various mediums, but the main focus is yacht rap. Helen, my dear, sainted wife, was really into the sort-of softcore hip hop and she got me hooked on it. I’d never listened to music before Helen, can you believe that? Classical Russian symphonies and the like but nothing contemporary. She really opened my eyes to a wide world of good and as a way to cope with her death, I started making some mix tapes in my basement. It turns out I’m actually pretty good at it and I’ve gained quite a following.

Do you ever play live?
I’ve had a few small gigs here and there. Frat parties, corporate events, and the like. I’d like to do a full tour but it’s tough to squeeze it in between all the murders, especially with so many people on my tail. I was supposed to play Fyre Festival, though.

Wait you were supposed to be at Fyre Fe-
I was so shocked by this information that I distractedly pressed so hard into my notepad that I snapped the head off the borrowed fountain pen.

I…oh my I…I’m so sorry, John.
You…you broke my pen. The pen my beautiful, kind, loving, sainted wife, Helen, the woman who brought me from the brink of death, who taught me how to love and to see colors in the world, gave me on our second wedding anniversary. You. Broke. My. Pen. AHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Collected Works: The Marvel Cinematic Universe (Updated)

With Avengers: Endgame opening this weekend, I felt it only right to take a look back at where we have come over the course of the last 11 years and 21 movies. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is historic in a number of ways, unlike anything that came before, and laying the foundation (for better or for worse) of what is likely to come in the future. You may suffer from superhero fatigue, and you are right to find yourself in such a state, but what Disney and Marvel have done with these films is undeniable and immeasurable feat. I did a ranking of the Marvel movies back in 2017 and in 2015 but for such a momentous occasion as Endgame, I thought we should bring in a few more voices than just my own. We started off with the rankings of Megan Spell from the On the Download podcast. Yesterday, we featured Ariel Rada from the Geek101 podcast. And I’ll conclude the series tomorrow with my updated rankings. Thanks for reading! -Brian

NOTE: I put the movies in tiers in part because I have the NFL Draft on in the background and it feels right and in part because, for me, so many of these movies are very close in overall quality. Consider each tier to be a handful of movies that are, by the letter grade system, all about the same grade in my book.

TIER VII
21. Thor: The Dark World
Still the only MCU property that I consider to be actually bad. Lots of these movies have flaws but Dark World is an entire movie of flaws. It took the shine off of both Hemsworth and the titular character and it is, frankly, completely pointless.

TIER VI
20. The Incredible Hulk
I think both Ed Norton and Tim Roth give strong performances here and the movie itself is far from a lost cause. It feels disconnected, however, from the rest of the MCU and it just lacks most of the craftsmanship you come to expect from these movies.

19. Iron Man 2
IM2 is incredibly watchable and mostly competent. That’s…about it? Perhaps its greatest sin is having Sam Rockwell at its disposal and making him a beating. Still, there’s plenty of fun Tony Stark-iness and it’s fine overall.

18. Ant-Man
I really, really like elements of Ant-Man, starting with the casting of the immortal Paul Rudd, and the movie has some great moments. But there’s a real struggle to translate (and, perhaps, dumb down) Edgar Wright’s script and as a result, I always walk away from this one feeling like it could amount to so much more. (Turns out they just needed another go round to get it right. See below.) 

TIER V
17. Doctor Strange
Strange has two big factors in its favor. One, the visuals are stunning. The fight scenes are relatively bland, but the look of the movie is outstanding. Two, it’s got a great cast. Cumberbatch, my beloved Rachel McAdams, Tilda Swinton, Chiwetel Ejiofor, etc. are all excellent actors slumming it for a silly superhero movie. I love that. The plot, though, is very lackluster and I think it feels like a 2010 movie, not a 2016 movie. For me, it’s one of the least rewatchable MCU movies.

16. Thor
I have a soft spot for Thor because it launched Chris Hemsworth and for that, we all owe the movie a great debt. I also think Kenneth Branagh did yeoman’s work in making this movie work AT ALL even if its actual returns are mostly above average. The settings and themes should’ve made this movie inaccessible but instead it ticks along quite well for the most part. A miserable usage of Natalie Portman, however. At least this was rectified in Dark World oh wait it super was not.

15. Captain America: The First Avenger
This is a strong, capable origin story. No more and no less. The stroke of genius comes in the final scene when Steve Rogers is brought out of the ice into the present day rather than succumbing to the temptation of having Cap spend two or three movies in the 40’s before jumping him to the future. You get just enough of Cap’s righteousness, his war-era moral fortitude, and then drop him into the modern age where his virtues are dorky but refreshing instead of obnoxious.

14. Captain Marvel
There’s a lot to like here: Brie Larson is excellent in her role, and of course I love the 90’s vibe. It’s a fun movie but one that feels a bit insubstantial in its actual content compared to the best of the MCU. Like Doctor Strange, there’s a bit of origin story fatigue in play here as well.

13. Avengers: Age of Ultron
There are some real highs within Ultron that I greatly appreciate. That said, you can also see the studio interference on this one more so than anywhere else in the MCU. But it does feel like Whedon lost the plot a few times and Spader’s Ultron never quite reaches the heights that we expected and the movie demands.

TIER IV
12. Iron Man 3
This is, somewhat shockingly, the most divisive movie within the MCU. Its fans will argue its virtues vehemently and its detractors will go so far as to compare it to the worst of the worst superhero movies. I come down much closer to the former rather than the latter. In fact, I LOVE two thirds of this movie and I think Shane Black brought out the absolute best in both Tony Stark and Iron Man. The issue for me is the last 30 minutes. The movie squanders a great twist on the Mandarin character and then drowns us in a sea of Iron Man suits (ALL OF THE IRON MAN SUITS!!!) and by the end you’re just like, “Enough. Please. Please stop.”

11. Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2
My expectations for Volume 2 were very high. Too high, it turned out. Separating the Guardians from one another had mixed results and I think James Gunn rested on his laurels a bit too much when it came to copy-pasting the formula. But still, what a fun movie! And, as I’ve said many times, no movie or franchise has ever been made worse by the addition of Kurt Russell.

10. Ant-Man and the Wasp
This movie got everything right that the first movie missed on but still maintained the tone that Edgar Wright’s original script was going for. It just feels more comfortable overall and thus, it flows much better than Ant-man does for me. The addition of Evangeline Lilly’s Wasp as a character who is equal to or greater than the established hero is AWESOME and it strengthens this franchise moving forward exponentially.

TIER III
9. Captain America: Civil War
Captain America is the least interesting of the core Avengers to me and thus, you have to stick him into interesting storylines to make his movies work. Mission accomplished here in what is basically Avengers 2.5. It is remarkable that the Russos were able to pit our heroes against each other without making any of them unlikable (except Vision who, I think we can all agree, can kick rocks). My issue with Civil War remains the pacing (there are, like, 450 scene changes in the first 30 minutes) and the overstuffed nature of the plot. I get it, I understand why this was necessary, but still, it’s a lot to take in and it doesn’t always flow seamlessly.  

8. The Avengers
I think this remains the greatest achievement in comic book movie history. The team-up thing has almost become blasé at this point and I’m not sure younger generations, like my son, who were born into a movie world dominated by cinematic universes can quite understand what a massive undertaking this movie was for Joss Whedon and how risky the entire phase one was for Disney/Marvel. We’re now seven years and 157 Marvel movies out from Avengers and still, it looks good, the characters mesh well, the stakes feel significant, and the movie works really, really well. It’s almost impossible that this thing worked, and still works, as well as it did.

TIER II (Stands alone for the time being.)
7. Avengers: Infinity War
I’ve had Infinity War both higher and lower on my list because, in actuality, it’s an incomplete. Until I see Endgame later today, I don’t think I can properly evaluate and understand the implications of Infinity War. Regardless, this movie has a grand story, the fight sequences bang, and, against impossible odds, they brought the long-awaited reveal on Thanos home in a big, spectacular way. 

TIER I (Truly, these could go in almost any order and I’ve rearranged them several times.)
6. Iron Man
The OG of the MCU, much like Avengers, deserves so much credit for setting the stage and building the foundation not just for this universe but for the modern blockbuster in general (for better or for worse). It’s an outstanding example of how to do a true origin story, how to stoke interest in your universe, and how to cast your characters. Can you imagine Tony Stark being played by anyone other than Robert Downey, Jr.? NO! And the entire MCU rests upon his shoulders.

5. Spider-Man: Homecoming
Finally. Finally, we got a Spider-Man movie that got both Peter Parker AND Spider-Man right. FINALLY. Tom Holland is outstanding in both parts of this role, the John Hughes-esque feel of the movie is the perfect conduit through which to tell the story, and Michael Keaton gives us the best villain within the MCU and does so with grit. 

4. Captain America: Winter Soldier
You can make a strong case (as Ariel did yesterday) that Winter Soldier is the best movie in this universe. Much like its descendant Civil War, the story surrounding Steve Rogers is what makes the movie work and boy, is this an exciting, well-designed story that essentially turns the movie into a spy thriller with incredible action. (INCREDIBLE action.) The only dips in quality are Robert Redford’s mailed-in performance (so disappointing to me) and the weird Nazi Computer scene that really goes off the rails. The Winter Soldier himself, however: AWESOME.

3. Guardians of the Galaxy
Of all the movies on this list, I remember my first Guardians viewing the best. It was an INCREDIBLE theater experience, one of those all-too-rare occasions where the audience was totally with it and the movie brought us all pure, unadulterated joy. It was a wholly unique experience and while the vibe has been copied (by its own sequel, even) since, it still retains its brilliance after many, many viewings.

2. Thor: Ragnarok
Ragnarok did so much to restore Hemsworth’s movie star status while casting the character in a whole new light. I remember thinking Taika Waititi was a weird choice for director and holding a bit of skepticism going in and then, within the first three minutes, understanding exactly what the movie was going for and knowing that it was perfect. To top it all off, whereas Guardians suffers a bit from a mediocre villain, Ragnarok brings in Queen Cate Blanchett who absolutely nails her role and gives the movie some bite. ALSO JEFF GOLDBLUM!!!

1. Black Panther
This is a perfect comic book movie and very nearly a perfect movie overall. It has substance, it has style, it has an outstanding lead actor surrounded by even more outstanding supporting players, and it has a great villain. Black Panther is the total embodiment of what can happen when a studio gives a great director a ton of money and total freedom to make the movie he/she wants to make. The cultural importance of this movie cannot be overstated but I think that, in some ways (for all the right reasons), has come to overshadow how good the movie is just as a movie. I see lots of movies every year that have great intentions and tell an important story but are not actually good movies. Black Panther is a great movie.

Let's Talk About the Dad in Pet Sematary

As a parent, I am, perhaps annoyingly, particularly attuned to bad parenting in movies. Whether it’s out and out evil parenting, typical inattentive and/or negligent parenting, or bad parenting decisions made simply for the sake of plot convenience, I find myself making mental notes on the moms and dads I see on screen, usually in terms of what not to do. So, as a Movie Parenting aficionado (self-certified), when I tell you the dad in the original Pet Sematary is one of the worst movie dads ever, I expect you’ll trust my educated opinion. When you watch Pet Sematary (you should not watch Pet Sematary, for the record), the first thing that jumps out at you is Herman Munster’s accent. This is undebatable; the accent should be listed as a character unto itself. But the second thing that makes itself incredibly obvious within the first five minutes of the film is that Dr. Louis Creed (played by Dale Midkiff) is a horrible, HORRIBLE parent. Let’s have a look, chronologically through the timeline of the film, at the twenty biggest mistakes Mr. Creed makes as the events of Pet Sematary unfolds.

(Perhaps it goes without saying but HERE BE SPOILERS.) 

1.)   Buys a house on a very busy street, apparently, without ever having visited the house.
I’m sure Mr. Creed is not the first person to have bought a house without ever actually visiting said house but my guy, you’ve got two small children and a cat. Might want to make sure there’s not a very busy trucker road located fourteen feet from your front door. Also, there’s a path to a pet cemetery on your property. You probably want to know that before you buy.

2.)   Leaves his tiny son all alone right next to said very busy street.
To be fair, this one is at least partially on his wife but still: I get that your daughter is hurt and you need to make sure she’s okay but someone needs to take charge of the tiny toddler because, again, you bought a stupid house and he is at all times no further than fourteen feet away from being crushed by a large truck.

3.)   Has a cat.
Never own a cat in a movie, you guys.

4.)   Talks to his weird neighbor (Jud Crandall).
Never talk to your weird neighbor whether you’re in a movie or real life.

5.)   Allows the creepy housekeeper to come back a second time after the first very creepy encounter.
I’m willing to give the Creeds a pass on the initial hire of the very creepy Ms. Dandridge. They’re new in town and looking for help, it stands to reason that they don’t know she’s a creeper. But one visit is really all it should take to make sure she never comes back again.

6.)   Follows weird neighbor to a cursed burial ground.
Mr. Crandall: “Hey I know I just met you yesterday or something, but I see that your cat is dead. Would you mind following me up in into the mountains while carrying the carcass? We’re gonna walk right on past an actual pet cemetery and I don’t plan on telling you what we’re doing until we actually get to our destination.”
Mr. Creed: “Sure.”

7.)   Actually buries the cat in said cursed burial ground.
Mr. Crandall: “Now that you’ve followed me past the pet cemetery and into the mountains, we’ve arrived at this VERY CLEARLY MARKED cursed burial ground. Time for you to bury your cat here.”
Mr. Creed: “Sure.”

8.)   Doesn’t blanch when the neighbor says they have to keep the cat’s burial a secret.
At this point, I’d understand the impetus to not wanna be really open with what just happened because you’ve made a lot of dumb mistakes in this whole operation and maybe you’d rather just keep that to yourself. But as soon as your weird neighbor starts making a deal about not telling anyone what’s what, that’s when you’ve got to know that you very much DO need to tell someone.

9.)   Accepts the neighbor’s excuse for leading him into this whole mess in the first place.
This fool knew exactly what was going to happen with your formerly dead cat, having experienced the terrifying rebirth of a pet himself, instructed you to follow suit, and you’re just totally cool with his reasoning? Come on, bro!

10.) Doesn’t kill the cat even though it has freaky glowing eyes.
Okay, alright, we’re in this now. You’ve made some bad choices, but you can still salvage something out of this whole thing if you just Old Yeller the cat right away. But instead, this fool just lets the cat stick around and basically haunt the house like it’s no big deal that his eyes are glowing like that.

11.) Basically cops out when his daughter asks him about the afterlife.
You may not have all the answers, and no one will fault you for being vague. But when your daughter asks you about the afterlife, having just attended her first funeral, your answer CANNOT be, “Eh, I dunno.”

12.) Doesn’t freak out when his wife admits to laughing maniacally when her sister died.
This is probably the most disturbing scene in the movie. I know you’re married and stuff and you want to support your spouse. But I gotta be honest, if my wife comes at me with that kind of crazy, I’m at least making some calls and looking for a couch to crash on if nothing else. Instead, good ol’ Louis is just COOL with this information.

13.) Lets his son get hit by a truck.
A couple things here. One, you KNOW this road is apparently destination number one for big rigs so maybe you wanna keep an eye on that. Two, toddlers are slow. You could give my kid a 50-yard head start on a 55-yard race and I’d still smoke him, not even accounting for his life being on the line. All things considered, we may be vacating the territory covered by “negligence” and moving on into “criminal negligence.”

14.) Does not listen to the ghost when he warns him about the cursed burial ground.
You should always listen to and heed the advice of ghosts. Always.

15.) Goes right on ahead and digs up his dead son despite the warnings from a ghost.
We all grieve in different ways and it’s not cool to mock someone’s grief process…unless that grief process involves the exhumation of your recently deceased toddler son despite a ghost very clearly telling you not to do that. Also, WHY IS HE SMILING while digging up his son?! What is happening?!

16.)  Swears to dead son that, “It’s going to be alright.”
Narrator: It was not alright.

17.) Leaves his scalpel just sitting around in his bag where literally anyone can get it.
I have no idea if real surgeons do this or if it’s just a movie thing. Regardless, if you’ve got kids in the house (even if you can’t anticipate the resurrection of your demon toddler although you probably should since that’s exactly what you plotted to bring about), I’m going to suggest not leaving an extremely sharp blade in your bag where any little hands could get ahold of it.

18.) Does not just THROW the murderous zombie baby when he is being attacked.
Babies do not weigh much. Even murderous zombie babies weigh, at most, 30 pounds. Chuck that sucker down the stairs, dude!!! I know he has a scalpel and stuff, but he is a baby! Throw him!

19.) Learns literally nothing from this experience and goes ahead and buries his dead wife in cursed burial ground.
So, let’s get this straight. Your cat came back to life and was essentially the worst version of a cat ever. Then a ghost told you not to re-bury your dead son, but you didn’t listen. Then said dead son kills your wife and your weird neighbor and tried to kill you. Somehow you survived. And to commemorate the occasion, you make the mind-boggling decision to run it back and try it again with your dead wife? Alright, man, you reap what you sow.

20.) Makes out with dead wife.
Just me but I’m super uninterested in making out with my recently dead wife while her eye is hanging out of her head having been, you know, recently murdered by my zombie toddler. But you do you, Louis. You do you.

Dirk Forever

When the Mavericks won the NBA Championship in 2011, I was in a state of euphoria that lasted for maybe six months. It was a Sports High that I had never experienced previously and probably will never experience again. At some point in the hours following the final buzzer, Lindsey jokingly said to me, “You are insane right now. I think you’re happier now than you were when we got married.” I smiled sheepishly and replied, “Well…I mean…I’ve known Dirk longer.”

I cannot in good faith recommend that line of logic to any young (or old) men looking for marriage advice but there is a bit of truth to our exchange. I attended my first Mavs game in 1991 and fell in love with both the team and the game. My unbridled admiration was repaid with a decade of Mavericks basketball that was like something out of a Sports Nightmare. 11 wins (out of 82) the first season, 13 (again, out of 82; this is very not good, if you’re wondering) the following season, the devastating trade of my favorite player (Derek Harper), a hint of light in the form of Jason Kidd and the Three J’s in 1995 that was quickly dashed out by a feud involving Toni Braxton (she did NOT unbreak my heart), etc. The mid-to-late 90’s were mostly made up of bad basketball, embarrassing facilities, and a revolving door of stiff white guys who seemed to relish every opportunity to get dunked on by the rest of the league while Young Brian looked on in horror and disgust. It was all very, very bad and I watched or listened to every single game, pleading for a team that was merely competent if not actually good. 

I was 15 when the Mavericks drafted a skinny white dude from Germany, and I was furious. If there was anything worse than a tall white basketball player, it was a tall white basketball player from EUROPE. Just one time I wanted to root for someone who had actual skill and athleticism, someone who was tough, someone who could maybe be the dunker instead of the dunkee every once in a while. I didn’t hate Dirk Nowitzki; if anything, I pitied him. He was very clearly not prepared for life in the NBA and the Mavs’ coach and GM, Don Nelson, kept touting him as a future great. It was embarrassing, really, and worse, it felt like Dirk was embarrassed, too. Like when you’re eight and your parents want you to sing in front of a group of adults and you know you’re really not that good of a singer in the first place and why do these random adults want to hear you sing about the state bird of Texas or something, anyway. That’s how Dirk looked on the floor.  

Me, at 15 (or maybe 14, it doesn’t matter, the bad look has always been the same), and Dirk, at his introductory press conference.

At the end of that first season, you could begin to see, if you squinted your eyes really, really hard, an actual basketball player somewhere in there. Not necessarily a good basketball player and certainly not a future great like Nelson predicted; but just a solid, competent basketball player. “That would be something,” I thought. “If he could just be, like, a decent role player, that would salvage something out of this draft pick.” And then he went home to Germany and hung out with his savant coach, Holger, and he worked. his. butt. off. The next season, he was, almost unbelievably, a good basketball player! And then he went home to Germany and he hung out with Holger and he worked. his. butt. off. The next season, he was one of the 15 best players in the league and the Mavs won a playoff series for the first time in over a decade. And then he went home to…You get the picture. Every season, Dirk Nowitzki came back from the offseason a better player and a stronger man, physically and mentally, ready to take on whatever the NBA had to throw at him. His work ethic is the stuff of legends in NBA circles. He became a top-five player. He won the MVP award. He battled with some of the best players the NBA has ever seen spanning two (and maybe even three) generations. And he won a championship in the most unlikely fashion imaginable.

There were many things I didn’t know about Dirk Nowitzki when his rookie season ended in 1999. I didn’t know how much joy he would bring me over the next 20 years. I didn’t know about his brilliant, dry, self-deprecating sense of humor. I didn’t know how incredibly hard he worked. I didn’t know that he would lead my favorite team, a truly cursed franchise, to unbelievable heights and nearly unparalleled long-term success. I didn’t know how angry I would get when someone, anyone, disrespected him or his legacy. I didn’t know that by the end of it all, he would stand amongst the very best of all the players to ever pick up a basketball by virtually every statistical and anecdotal standard known to man. I didn’t know that he would someday strap his team, the organization, the city, and the fans to his back and almost single-handedly carry us all to Basketball Glory. I didn’t know I would spend the week surrounding his retirement in a constant state of tears-or-almost-tears. I didn’t know that 21 years after that first game, I’d be making my son watch an old man limp up and down the court in hopes that he would retain some memory of seeing him play.

There have been so, so many great things written and said about Dirk over the last few days. (This piece from The Ringer is great, this video that fronted the TV coverage of the final home game absolutely gutted me, and this video brought Dirk to tears in the arena on Tuesday. Also, this and this and this and this and this.) Likewise, there are thousands of stories I would like to include here and in fact, I have written and cut out many, many words from this piece and tucked them away into a file I’ll definitely open someday when I definitely write that book about basketball I am definitely going to write. In the interest of time, I want to touch on two points that have come up frequently in the Dirk coverage.

One, during the post-game ceremony on Tuesday night - which saw Dirk surprised by the arrival of his five basketball heroes - both Charles Barkley and Larry Bird referenced their respect for Dirk because he, “Played the game the right way.” The aforementioned work ethic. The fierce, fierce competitiveness and intensity that burned through him on the court. The 80-odd million dollars he left on the table over the years in order to give the team a chance to bring in free agents, rather than demanding the very last dollar he was entitled to in each contract negotiation. The fact that, as has been the source of much celebration this week, he played with one team his entire career, riding the roller coaster that is professional sports in the ups and the downs and providing a source of stability in a world that rarely sees it. The consistency with which he made the right decision, the right play, over and over again with no regard to his own ego or statistics. (Even on Tuesday, during his swan song, with the crowd going INSANE every time he touched the ball, multiple times he passed up difficult shots because it was the right basketball play.) There’s a humility to Dirk that almost doesn’t exist within professional athletes and it flows through everything he does on the court and off. That stuff is contagious and it’s why you can scarcely find a player with anything bad to say about Dirk, it’s why the Mavericks were able to take in players with bad reputations and “fix” them multiple times over the years, it’s why all-time legends like Bird and Barkley will come out for his last game and laud him effusively.

The second thing that’s been a great point of emphasis is the connection between Dirk and the city of Dallas. In the video I linked above, Mark Followill (the Mavs’ play-by-play broadcaster for the last 19 years) mentions the sense that permeated the Metroplex during the epic run of 2011 that we wanted the Mavs to win, of course, because this was our team, but also, and maybe even more importantly, because we wanted it for Dirk. I had kind of forgotten about that in the years since 2011 until this week and it hit home while watching that video. There was this bond between us all, a shared sentiment, that our experience, our happiness, was less important than Dirk’s or maybe that our prospective happiness was tied into Dirk’s happiness. You almost couldn’t talk about the Mavs and their pursuit of the championship in 2011 without someone (or everyone) saying something like, “I just want Dirk to win a ring. That guy deserves it.” That feeling has only grown in the post-championship years. We feel this way because he’s played the game the right way and because, whereas some superstars shirk responsibility while simultaneously seeking recognition, Dirk has always operated in the exact opposite fashion: He’s actively gone out and sought the pressure that comes with carrying a team and a city and a fanbase while never making it about himself. Add to that his openness off the court, his willingness to do stupid bits for in-arena videos, his charity work, his unprecedented loyalty to a team, even when, frankly, the team did not deserve his loyalty, the kindness that he willingly shows to his fans (especially kids), and the genuineness with which he has carried himself from the beginning. What you see with Dirk is who Dirk is and because he’s shared that with us, we’ve embraced him in a way that is almost entirely unique in this era of sports. I hope you can understand how rare that is, even if you don’t know a thing about sport.

My generation and I are the luckiest of all Mavs fans. I have quite literally grown up with Dirk Nowitzki and watched him grow up as well. I got a long, terrible taste of what it was like to root for the Mavs pre-Dirk and then rode along with him for 21 years, 1500 games, 15 playoff appearances, and one glorious, perfect championship. He IS Dallas to me and I’m far from alone in that sentiment. It is highly unlikely that any team will ever have THIS, this feeling, this moment, this experience, again, let alone the Mavs. And even still, even with the sense that it’s likely all downhill from here, we should consider ourselves among the luckiest of sports fans.

Thank you, Dirk. Thank you for teaching me about hard work. Thank you for providing stability for a franchise that desperately needed it. Thank you for being the rare athlete with an actual sense of humor. Thank you for over 31,000 points and 1,000 wins. Thank you for being Uncle Dirk to hundreds of sick kids and their families. Thank you for playing with unbelievable intensity that almost never boiled over into hostility. Thank you for sticking around long enough for my son to know your name. Thank you for 2011.

Dirk forever.

Fave Five: John Goodman

You know who doesn’t have an Academy Award nomination and who definitely should have at least an Academy Award nomination if not an actual Academy Award? John Goodman. I’m sure if I did an exhaustive search of both memory and my vast assortment of movie-related spreadsheets, I could turn up a big bunch of actors and actresses who should have been nominated for an Oscar by now but haven’t been. But in this very moment, if you asked me who is the best working actor/actress who doesn’t have at least an Oscar nomination on his/her resume, I’d name Goodman and feel good about my answer.

 John Goodman is the best. He’s a heck of actor, by all accounts a great guy, and someone who brings joy to my heart every time he shows up on screen no matter how large or small the role. He’s also one of the original American Treasures that Richard and I came up with before Mad About Movies even began and obviously, I expect this is the achievement of which he is proudest. With Captive State opening this weekend, I looked back at his illustrious career and picked my five favorite movie performances.

5. John Chambers, Argo
This felt like the performance that was most likely to bring an Oscar nomination, though Supporting Actor is always a deep category. I’m not sure there is a better example of Goodman’s inherent likability and pleasantness than what you get with Chambers. The character exudes a much-needed sense of optimism that perfectly balances the inherent hopelessness that exists within the plot.

4. Sully, Monsters Inc. and University
I’m always ready to ride or die for a Pixar movie and Monsters Inc. is one of their best in my estimation. I love how Goodman (and Billy Crystal, too) blends his personality into the on-screen character and I think that’s part of what makes the heart of the movie, Sully and Boo, work so well. Sometimes in animation, the voice is just the voice and the art is just the art and there’s a sense of separation between the two parts. That’s not the case with Goodman and Sully and because of that, I think, you get one of the truly great characters in the Pixar universe.  

3. Gale, Raising Arizona
This was basically my only frame of reference for Goodman for many years, having never watched Roseanne during its first run. I loved Raising Arizona from an early (too early?) age and always found Gale to be hilarious. Now I see the classic Goodman traits all over this character and it’s kind of amazing that he had such a great sense of identity this early in his career.

2. Howard, 10 Cloverfield Lane
Goodman hasn’t dabbled much in on-screen villainy but 10 Cloverfield Lane exemplifies what a great villain he can be when called upon. Howard is creepy, to be sure, but he’s also very caring and he keeps his craziness relegated to his edges so that you’re never quite sure of what you did and did not see; little pockets of anger that burst forth then dance back behind his pleasant-ish façade. I’d wager it’s a much more nuanced performance than you’d get from most actors in his place and his ability to keep both the audience and his on-screen counterparts on unstable ground makes this movie what it is.

1. Walter Sobchak, The Big Lebowski
I could expand this list out to 20 or 30 entries, but the top spot would never be in jeopardy. Goodman fits the Coen’s world so incredibly well, whether it’s in the aforementioned Raising Arizona or a short stint as a stoic passenger in Inside Llewyn Davis but Lebowski is where he truly shines. Walter is a buffoon and an unhinged buffoon at that but with Goodman at the wheel, he’s a thousand times more likable and memorable than he has any right to be. To be sure, the Coens gave him some INCREDIBLE lines to deliver but it is the actual delivery that brings them home and Goodman knocks every single one of his scenes out of the park. As much as I love Jeff Bridges in the lead and admire the work of Steve Buscemi, John Turturro, Julianne Moore, and the rest, I think it’s Goodman that holds the movie together and provides the most entertainment.

Go-To Non-Pixar/Disney Animated Movies

In this, the year of our Lord, 2019, my kid has access to approximately 100 billion TV shows and movies and that’s not even counting the weird stuff happening over on YouTube. My kid, probably like most of your kids or your future hypothetical kids, is brilliant at finding the absolute dumbest, most annoying TV show or movie to watch and then becoming obsessed with it. Did you know there are, like, 47 different Power Rangers shows on Netflix? I didn’t. But now I do. Because my kid is adept at finding them. Do you know what Mini Force is? I didn’t. But now I do. And, guys, I really wish I still didn’t. Did you know that, if you let them, kids will watch the same exact movie not just every single day but multiple times every single day? They’re not like normal humans who watch a movie once and then think, “That was great. I’ll watch that again someday.” No. They think, “That was great. I shall watch it again immediately and then probably again and again and again until the adult in charge of me loses his/her mind.” It’s maddening. There is an overwhelming abundance of choices available to these little monsters and somehow, they never make the right choice. 

We watch a lot of movies in my household (duh) and I try to pick my spots as to when to force a movie of my choosing upon my son, in theory so as to broaden his horizons but in reality, so as to keep my brain from becoming Minionized. With both LEGO Movie 2 and How to Train Your Dragon: Hidden World dropping this month, I thought I’d have a look at a handful of non-Pixar/Disney animated kid’s movies that are actually good and equally enjoyable for kids and adults alike. These are my go-to “suggestions” (read: “I will give you three options and you can choose which movie you want from those three movies”) for my kid when he’s watched too much Mini Force or tried to trick me into letting him watch Despicable Me 3 for the 400th time this month. You’re welcome, parents and future parents.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs Series
The first of these movies is definitely better than the second and the second is definitely better than the TV series. But these are favorites of mine in part because the voice talent is substantial (Bill Hader, Andy Samberg, Anna Faris, etc.) and in part because Lord and Miller directed the first movie and brought to it the kinds of witty humor you’d expect. The movies differentiate extensively from the book if you’re concerned about that kind of nonsense but they’re vibrant in color and humor.

How to Train Your Dragon Series
I am supremely pumped for the third and final movie in this series and I know my kid is, too, considering he has asked me when it comes out literally every single day for the last month. This series will grow on you quickly if you let it and the themes mature and progress substantially from the first movie to the second. I like the messaging at the core of these movies and the depth of the characters surpasses all but the very best Pixar has to offer.

The Iron Giant
The reputation of this one precedes itself as it is one of the more popular, better-received animated films of the last 25 years and comes from the brilliant mind of Brad Bird. I confess, this isn’t my favorite animated movie and I think the animation is only so-so. But, the actual Iron Giant himself is AWESOME, Vin Diesel provides the voice (always a plus, obviously), and one time, my son watched this movie four times in one day (thanks a lot, random snow day in Texas) and not only was he entertained, I wasn’t stabbing my eyes out with fork so that probably says a lot about the movie’s quality. 

The LEGO Movies
I would hazard to guess that of all the movies on this list, and perhaps all animated movies in general, my son has probably watched The LEGO Movie the most. Combine that with LEGO Batman and LEGO Ninjago and you’ve got yourself a highly entertaining universe with strong messages that is insanely rewatchable. Plus, in a rare win-win for parents and soulless corporations alike, it has proven nearly impossible for my child to watch a LEGO movie without then wanting to play with and build LEGOs. Does this cost me more money? Yeah, it totally does. But is it awesome that he wants to actually play instead of stare at a screen? Yeah, it totally is.

The Lorax
Most Dr. Seuss movies have turned out poorly and, I admit, The Lorax isn’t great, at least in comparison to the best animated kid’s movies on the market. But, for one, I love this book and its central themes. And two, it serves as a good introduction (or re-introduction after the original Grinch) to all things Seuss if your kid hasn’t come around on the books or needs a screen to tell him/her something is cool. The movie looks great, too, with a lot of pop-off-the-screen colors that will keep your kid entertained without them ever noticing that they’re actually absorbing the story’s moral (maniacal laugh).

Megamind
I had mostly forgotten about Megamind after seeing it in theaters in 2010 until we got HBOGo and it popped up on the kid’s feed. This has a great voice cast, the action moves with great purpose, and there are a ton of jokes for the adults. Plus, it’s kind of nice watching a superhero movie that is disconnected from the MCU or the DCEU.

Over the Hedge
The caveat on this one is, it’s not an “anytime, all the time” kind of movie. Meaning, it’s not so good that you will want to watch it over and over; you have to pick your spots. This is one I’ll bust out when Cooper INSISTS on an animated movie and we’ve already gone through most of my favorites and allllll of his. I save it for the longest part of summer break or the Christmas holidays, stuff like that. It’s a fun movie with lively animation and a touch of the Minions-type humor that will keep your kid entertained without totally melting his/her brain. Best of all, the soundtrack is all Ben Folds songs and I’m always looking for ways to teach my kid how to rock the suburbs.

Trolls
Yeah, you read that right. I’m recommending Trolls. Sorry not sorry. I’m not saying it’s Pixar, obviously, but if I have to choose between Despicable Me, another round of PJ Masks, or Power Rangers Ninja Turbo Storm Steel (possibly not a real title but who knows, really) and Trolls, I’m taking Trolls every time. The movie’s got jokes, the story is fun, and the music is super catchy which means you’ll hate yourself three days later when you’re STILL humming “Can’t Stop This Feeling” but your kid will be entertained no matter how many times you watch it and will probably leave you alone for an hour so you can get some work done or, like, lay on the couch and stare off into space.

Community with a Capital C

On Wednesday, I picked little dude up from school and on the walk back home (which is basically, like, two very long baseball throws away from where I meet him after school), he complained that his legs hurt. This is a relatively common refrain as he is growing and has the minor pains to show for it and also, I limp around pretty much all the time due to various stupid leg ailments and he thinks this is how humans are supposed to be. I don’t know how to tell him that I just need new legs and most humans can actually walk without their ankles clicking continuously. Anyway, I kind of brushed off his complaints as his way of trying to get out of swim lessons which he doesn’t love and told him he was fine.

 Cut to three hours later when his “growing pains” had turned into full body aches, a headache, a stomach ache, and a 103-degree fever and a nurse practitioner telling us he has the flu.

 Coop was utterly miserable, but he handled every part of the exam like a champ until the doctor said, “No school for you tomorrow, little man.” At this point, he started crying (softly, as is his way, no big wails) not because he has some great love for school (he super does NOT) but because “tomorrow” was Valentine’s Day and this diagnosis meant he would be missing his Valentine’s Day party. I have a soft-hearted kid who gets so pumped for all elements of a party, who spent a lot of time meticulously writing, “To my friend, From Cooper” on all of his Valentine’s, who had been talking about this day for a solid week. To miss this dinky little class party seemed like the cruelest twist of the entire flu experience (to that point). I held him against my chest while he cried and Lindsey promised to, “throw an even better party than the school party.”

 The last 24 hours have been pretty miserable. No parent likes to see their kid suffer (except the mom from Mommy Dead and Dearest (LOOK IT UP)) and real sickness is one of the worst kinds of kid suffering. The Tamiflu mixed with fever dreams made him act incredibly weird a few times in the night and twice I sat with him while he puked and cried, “I don’t like being sick.” But still, I think it was missing the party that hurt him the worst. I had a bag of new toys for him when he woke up and we lounged together all day, watching movies and building LEGOs, the kind of day he longs for most of the time, but I could tell he was bummed.

 Then I got a text from our friend, Emily: “I left something for Cooper on the porch. The sadness of missing a school party just broke my heart.”

 I got Coop up from the couch for the first time in literally six hours and had him look on the porch where we found a bag full of goodies and a balloon. He smiled for the first time all day while pulling out coloring books and stickers and Black Panther tattoos and all kinds of good stuff that for sure trumped whatever he would’ve gotten at school. He was still running a huge fever and not eating but at least he was running a huge fever and not eating while applying Black Panther tattoos, you know? His spirit lifted.

 An hour later, I was making some lunch and Lucy Dog lost her mind, indicating someone had knocked. I opened the door to see another friend, Pam, getting back into her car. Waving, she said, “No kid should miss out on a class party, so we brought him a present” and drove off. Again, I got Coop up from the couch and brought him to the porch to discover a bouquet of balloons and a bag of homemade cookies (the greatest cookies known to man). Again, his feverish little body was wiped but his spirits rose.

 A bit later, Coop had caught on to this little game and suggested we check the porch again just in case there were more presents. “I think that was the end of it, pal,” I said with a laugh. I was wrong.

 Not long after Lindsey got home from work, she got a text from yet another friend, Micah, alerting her to a third front porch delivery. We brought Coop out again to find a huge bag of Valentine’s goodies, a drink from Sonic, and a card from his three best friends. He smiled from ear to ear and I think, maybe for the first time, he saw how well this day had turned out in spite of the flu’s best efforts.

 If I tell you, dear reader, that it was not entirely surprising that three different people would go out of their way to bring my son Valentine’s Day gifts just because he got the flu, something that millions of people are dealing with right now and which does not make him or us special, I hope you will take that as an indication of the incredible quality of the people who make up our Community. (I’m capitalizing it from here on out regardless of what my autocorrect tells me. That’s right, autocorrect, from now on, it’s Community with a capital ‘C’.) Lindsey and I have always tried to build strong relationships with the people around us, to use our house as a gathering place, to speak into the lives of our friends when called upon (and probably sometimes when not called upon) and I’m sure that’s built some currency amongst our people. But, truthfully, this is just who these people are. They come to see a disinterested four-year-old play soccer. They send texts of encouragement when work is challenging. They set out balloons and banners on the first day of school. They stay up all hours of the night exchanging TikTok videos because it’s been a long week and I need a laugh. They leave Valentine’s presents on the porch for a sad, sick little boy. In short, they show up when they’re needed and boy, were they needed today.

Find Community, y’all. Seek it out and pour yourself into it. Surround yourself with people who are good, people who care, people who show up when they’re needed most, and do your best to do the same for them. Because there will be a day when you really do need that Community most, when your tire is flat or you lose your job or you have a possum in your attic or your child misses his Valentine’s Day party because he has the flu. Thanks to all those who have taken on my son as a part of their Community.

Movie Rankings 2018

A+
A Star is Born
Mission: Impossible Fallout
A Quiet Place
Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse
Hearts Beat Loud
Black Panther

A
If Beale Street Could Talk
The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling
Avengers: Infinity War
Crazy Rich Asians
Blackkklansman
Eighth Grade
Blindspotting
Deadpool 2
Mary Poppins Returns
The Old Man and the Gun
Ant-Man and the Wasp
Leave No Trace
Isle of Dogs
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Three Identical Strangers
The Rider
Paddington 2
Bad Times at the El Royale
Ralph Breaks the Internet
First Man
American Animals
Creed II
Widows

A-
Incredibles 2
Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Beautiful Boy
The Favourite
Roma
22 July
Sorry to Bother You
Elvis Presley: The Searcher
Solo: A Star Wars Story
The Death of Stalin
Ready Player One
Kodachrome
A Futile and Stupid Gesture
Overlord
Searching
Game Night

B+
Thunder Road
Bumblebee
Annihilation
Outlaw King
To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before
Blockers
Searching
Papillon
Cargo

B
First Reformed
Support the Girls
Bird Box
I Think We’re Alone Now
Ocean’s 8
Sicario: Day of the Soldado
Hold the Dark
Halloween
The Commuter
Vice

B-
Tomb Raider
The Grinch
A Simple Favor
Hotel Artemis
Bohemian Rhapsody
Fantastic Beasts 2: The Crimes of Grindelwald
Den of Thieves

C+
White Boy Rick
The Equalizer 2
The Meg
Chappaquidick
You Were Never Really Here
Tully
Maze Runner: The Death Cure
Christopher Robin

C
Operation Finale
Unsane
Aquaman
Skyscraper
Hotel Transylvania 3
Pacific Rim Uprising

C-
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
Rampage
12 Strong
The Mule
Red Sparrow
The Cloverfield Paradox

D
Kin
Venom
Life of the Party
A Wrinkle in Time
Gringo
Mile 22
Mortal Engines
Robin Hood

F
Tag
The Darkest Minds
Hurricane Heist
Mowgli
Life Itself
The Spy Who Dumped Me
The Predator
Mute

Top 25 Movies - 2018

When determining the merits of a year in film, whether or not the year was “good”, I’m looking for one of two things: true greatness or depth. (I’d like both, but I’ll settle for one.) Looking back over 2018 and the hundred-and-ten-or-so films I saw this year, I’m not sure I can pinpoint true greatness; I’m talking, like, iconic, masterpiece-level movies. But depth? Yeah, 2018 had some real depth to it. I gave out A’s (A+ to A- on my very scientific, official rating scale) to 45 movies (and I’m sure I’ll add some more to that total as I finish out the rest of my list), a fairly high number compared to years past, and there are plenty of movies I quite enjoyed, that I’ll watch many times over in the future, which ultimately didn’t sniff my top 25 (Game Night, Ready Player One, and Solo to name a few). On the podcast this week, we’ll each go over our top ten and worst ten of the year but as a precursor, here’s a look at the best of 2018 that was under consideration or just missed a top-ten finish.

25. Creed II
This movie had so much to live up to in my eyes as Creed is a bona fide perfect movie and one that I watch constantly, always through a storm of tears. II put up a noble effort, became a worthy follow-up, and fully passed the torch from Rocky Balboa to Adonis Creed. Will be interesting to see where this franchise goes moving forward.

24. American Animals
A very inventive, fun movie with a sobering sense of morality as its backbone. I had no knowledge of this story going in and spent the bulk of the film’s runtime trying to figure out if the interviews with the supposed real-life criminals were actually real interviews or if this was all a figment of director Bart Layton’s imagination. Layton has a great sense of the audience’s intrigue, I think, and pulls the strings beautifully throughout. Animals also features a couple of great performances, that of Evan Peters in particular.

23. First Man
This was one of my most anticipated films of the year and yet, for all its beauty and technical brilliance, it left me a bit cold. In this, I think Damien Chazelle succeeded in making an outstanding film but perhaps came up short in connecting with the audience, something he did so well in both Whiplash and La La Land. Gosling is a marvel, though, and the moon landing sequence is truly breathtaking.

22. Ralph Breaks the Internet
Like Creed II, this movie pales a bit in comparison to its predecessor but overall, I found Ralph to be a blast to watch and expertly crafted. Its conceit and the meta-ness of its story work, I think, quite well and Disney has come quite a long way in creating a thriving franchise with what could have been a one-off character.

21. Bad Times at the El Royale
As the president of the “Cabin in the Woods Is Fine But Not Nearly As Good As Y’all Make It Out To Be” coalition for reason, I am of the opinion that Drew Goddard will one day make a perfect film. Bad Times isn’t quite that, straying just a tad here and there from the path of perfection, but it is darn good and features some of the best performances of the year (Cynthia Erivo and Jeff Bridges in particular). Plus, the Chris Hemsworth dance scene still haunts me but sort of in a good way?  

20. Paddington 2
The first movie I saw in 2018, it was all too easy to overlook Paddington 2 as the year wound down. But, upon rewatch, I was reminded of its sheer delightfulness and how unbelievably enjoyable these movies are. I didn’t know I needed a grumpy Brendan Gleeson teaming up with Paddington in order for my dreams to come true but now I do and they have and I am very happy.

19. The Rider
The winner of the Gotham Independent Spirit award for Best Picture, The Rider came out of nowhere for me and left me a teary-eyed mess. Chloe Zaho’s film is basically a documentary with a script in place, seemingly, only to give her novice actors a shove in the right direction. It is equal parts touching and gut-wrenching and you’re not sure until the final frames which side of that equation will win out.

18. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Buster Scruggs is equal parts hilarious, dark, weird, triumphant, and sobering. So, what I’m saying is, “This is a Coen Brothers’ movie.” Of the six Western-themed vignettes within Scruggs, five are outstanding with the closing chapter serving as the only outlier, but frankly, I could’ve gone for another half-dozen or so chapters without any trouble and hope the Coens return to this type of filmmaking again in the future.

17. Isle of Dogs
I had Isle in my top ten for the bulk of the year but confess I enjoyed it more the first time around than the second, the opposite of my experience with most Wes Anderson films. Still, I love the style and find this to be one of the funniest movies of the year, maybe THE funniest. Better still are the well-defined, relatable characters, quite a feat considering most of them are stop-motion dogs.

16. Leave No Trace
A small, quiet, brilliant film featuring two outstanding performances in the form of Ben Foster and newcomer Thomasin McKenzie. Debra Granik has a remarkable eye for talent (Winter’s Bone was Jennifer Lawrence’s breakout film right before her Hunger Games casting) but even more, an eye for story. Leave No Trace is an ode to a simpler form of life and the people who would choose it if only society would let them and Granik brings that home with aplomb.

15. Ant-Man and the Wasp
2018 was one of the better years for superhero movies (even as we approach the brink of superhero fatigue) and this movie was a big part of that overarching success. I think this was a HUGE step in turning this branch of the MCU into its own, self-sustaining limb, and provided some of the biggest laughs and purely enjoyable sequences of the year. Because I live with a five-year-old who wants to be Black Panther when he grows up, I have seen that movie many more times but if it were up to me, I might put this film at the very top of the MCU in terms of rewatchability.

14. The Old Man & the Gun
I’ll have more on Robert Redford himself in my favorite performances piece later this week so, without stealing too much from my future self, I’ll just say that Old Man is quite literally written specifically for Redford and it shows. David Lowery has rapidly became one of my very, VERY favorite filmmakers and Old Man did nothing but reaffirm his versatile brilliance in my mind. Perhaps the most charming movie of the year, if nothing else.

13. Deadpool 2
The combination of 2016’s Deadpool and 2017’s Logan have completely upended the world of superhero movies and Deadpool 2 builds upon that (in some cases quite literally) very well. Deadpool was excellent in its own right and I know I, along with other fans of the movie, worried what the sequel might look like, especially after original director Tim Miller parted ways with the franchise. As it turns out, it is NEVER a bad idea to add Josh Brolin to your movie (unless your movie is Jonah Hex *ziiiinnnngggg*) and this sequel actually turned out better than its predecessor in my mind.

12. Mary Poppins Returns
I went all over the place in anticipation for this one, back and forth between expected greatness and expected corporate blandness. Ultimately, the former won out and I couldn’t have been happier with this finished product. This wasn’t one of my favorite movies as a child or one that I’ve revisited numerous times as an adult but within ten minutes of the opening the credits, I was overwhelmed by how much I wanted/needed Mary Poppins in my life; I genuinely had no idea that connection existed within my soul. Returns is an utter delight and a beautiful reminder of the classic Disney magic that is often overlooked in a swath of lightsabers and Vibranium (both things that I also love, by the way). And did I mention that Emily Blunt is perfect and delightful and I love her? Well, I will in my next piece.

11. Blindspotting
I S-T-R-U-G-G-L-E-D with leaving Blindspotting out of my top ten and I still don’t feel good about it. This movie came and went with little-to-no fanfare (I’m not sure I ever even saw a trailer) which is a real travesty given how outstanding the performances are and the significance of its message and themes. Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal proved to be one of the truly great on-screen pairings of the year and I’m still thinking about the film over a month after my viewing. I expect we will hear much, much more from writer-director Carlos Lopez Estrada in the near future.

For my top 10 picks, along with those of my cohorts, Kent and Richard, hit the link to listen to the podcast episode.

I Read Some Books! 2018

I read all the time as a kid. Allllll the time. At some point, that stopped and while I still accumulated books (because I love physical media, I still very much enjoy the purchasing of actual books), I wasn’t reading them nearly as much as I was storing them on a shelf. I’m not big on New Year’s Resolutions but three years ago, I decided I was not happy with my reading output and vaguely vowed to “read more.” In 2016, I read 23 books. In 2017, I upped it to 33. In 2018, my goal was 45 books and, thanks in VERY large part to the angels at Audible who are doing the Lord’s work, I messed around and read 52. I like making lists, I like ranking things for no real reason, and I like large writing projects and so, I have chosen to write far too many words on all the books I read last year and hope you will at least browse through for some potential recommendations and thus, make the many hours I have spent on this in neglect of my wife, child, and friends seem worthwhile.

I did not include within this list the books I took on in 2018 which I had read previously. These included: “A Wrinkle in Time” by Madeline L’Engle, “Slaughterhouse 5” by Kurt Vonnegut, “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury, “The Breaks of the Game” by David Halberstam, and the “Red Rising” trilogy by Pierce Brown. All of these books would likely land somewhere in my top twenty for the year, with “Breaks” and the “Red Rising” trilogy coming in at or near the very top, but it didn’t feel right to count re-reads in the same group as new-reads. But just as a side recommend, the “Red Rising” trilogy is pretty much always available on Audible and iBooks/Kindle sales and I loved them even more on the second reading and you should give them a chance if they are even a little bit your thing.

BAD BOOKS
45. “The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.” - Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland (Audiobook)
As a Stage 8 Completionist, I am physiologically incapable of quitting a book, movie, stupid sports team that hurts me over and over again, etc. (I actually quit two books this year and my therapist is very proud of me.) “DODO” reeeeaaalllyyyy put that to the test both in terms of the story and the sheer length of the book. As an 8-10 hour read, “DODO” would’ve been harmless enough; as a near-30 hour read, “tedious” began to take on a whole new meaning.

44. “Old Records Never Die” - Eric Spitznagel (Book)
The subtitle for this book could’ve been, “The Author of this Book is a Truly Miserable Person and You Will Hate Him a Little More with Every Page You Turn.” I commend authors for not sugarcoating their life stories in autobiographies (see below) but woof, at some point, some serious soul-searching might’ve been in order for Mr. Spitznagel.

43. “Signal” - Tony Peak (Audiobook)
This was an Audible Original with a promising-enough premise that very quickly fell into a jumble of tropes. Worse yet, the reading was grating and even the sound mix was bad. I finished the book and moved on without formal complaint but apparently enough listeners did complain because a few weeks later, Audible emailed me to say they felt “Signal” wasn’t up to their standards and they gave me a free credit to make up for it. Because Audible loves me and they want me to be happy.

NOT GOOD BOOKS
42. “Pilot X” - Tom Merritt (Audiobook)
As with “DODO”, time travel proved to be too tricky a concept for the author to navigate here. Too much of “Pilot X” felt like an intensive explainer on gobbledygook while the rest felt like it was trying to find ways to work around said gobbledygook. At least this book was short and forgettable enough.  

41. “Dreams and Shadows” - C. Robert Cargill (Audiobook)
I like Cargill quite a bit and his career path has provided some inspiration for my own prospective writing “career”. “Dreams and Shadows”, however, took its dark fairy tale premise way, way too far for my tastes and I ended up being bummed out by the story most of the time. It’s a shame, really, because I liked the characters and Cargill’s writing (see below) but altogether, it was a bit of an unpleasant read/listen.

40. “Mongrels” - Stephen Graham Jones (Audiobook)
Pulpy and harmless, “Mongrels” should’ve found its way into the mediocre category with no aspirations of reaching further. But I found that every time the book started to find its way, to gain some momentum, Graham Jones would move into a tangential storyline or make an unnecessary shift to a side character and it wore me out after a while.

MEDIOCRE BOOKS
39. “At the Mountain of Madness” - HP Lovecraft (Audiobook)
Lovecraft’s influence on genre writing is, of course, quite substantial. His actual writing has never been my cup of tea, however, and his masterwork (or at least his most popular work) proved no different for me.

38. “Beacon 23” - Hugh Howry (Book)
I read the “Silo” trilogy by Howry a couple of years ago and really enjoyed it. “Beacon” was a much less inspired effort, albeit a quick, easy read. The setting is interesting enough but the story just doesn’t get anywhere and Howry seems to want to build out the world but never does.

37. “Last Year” - Robert Charles Wilson (Audiobook)
There are stretches of “Last Year” that I really enjoyed and the central conceit (a mirror, as it were, that allows the people of the present day to pass into a certain point in the past and vice versa) is well-thought out. Wilson deserves real credit for that as, in my experience, books like this often fall apart in taking a two-sentence idea and turning into a world. I never developed any attachment to or interest in the characters, though, and that was necessary for the book’s back third to come together, I think.

36. “The Spaceship Next Door” - Gene Doucette (Audiobook)
This book fell right in line with the average dime store sci-fi paperback from the 40’s and 50’s. It’s a fun idea, it reads easily, the writing is competent, and I forgot almost every detail of the book basically the second I finished it. Nothing wrong with that and at the time, I needed a nice, easy palate cleanser like “Spaceship”, and it did its job adequately.

35. “Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?” - Gregory Alan Thornbury (Book)
I was very excited about this one as Larry Norman is an extremely interesting figure about whom not much has been written over the last 25 years. Unfortunately, Mr. Thornbury’s writing style pales in comparison to his gifts as a researcher. To call this book “dry” would be a great understatement; much of it reads like a very boring doctoral thesis. I started reading “Devil” in July and it was literally the last book I finished on the year after having set it aside numerous times.

34. “Shadow of the Lions” - Christopher Swann (Audiobook)
When we’re on a road trip, Lindsey and I usually listen to an audiobook to pass the time. Finding something that appeals to both of our sensibilities and that won’t be scarring to our five-year-old if he happens to take his headphones off for a few minutes isn’t always easy. Thus, a lot of times we end up settling on a mystery/thriller, though it’s not my favorite genre. “Lions” fit the bill on one of our trips and it was just about exactly what I expected: the story was relatively interesting, the reader was solid, the writing was fine, and it passed the time on a long trip. That’s about it.

33. “Something in the Water” - Catherine Steadman (Audiobook)
As noted with “Lions”, mysteries aren’t my genre of choice but this one came highly recommended by basically everyone in the entire world and also it was already available in a friend’s Audible account that I hypothetically have access to (free book!). I really enjoyed this one for a while and I’m willing to extend some latitude to characters in this kind of book who must make poor decisions in order for the book to be, you know, a book. But at some point, I found myself internally screaming at the main character to, “JUST ONE TIME MAKE ONE GOOD DECISION FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING THAT IS GOOD AND HOLY JUST MAKE ONE GOOD DECISION PLEASE!!!” It was exhausting and I was angry by the end of it despite the quality of the writing/storytelling overall.  

32. “The Queen: Aretha Franklin” - Mikal Gilmore (Audiobook)
This was kind of a crash-course in Arethaology that Audible put out as one of its “Originals” selections shortly after her death. As such, it reads more like a longform article on The Queen of Soul more than an actual book, relying extensively on quotations and passages from other books and memoirs. It serves its purpose by giving the reader a Cliff’s Notes version of Aretha’s life but that’s about the extent of its value.

GOOD BOOKS?
31. “The Sea of Rust” - C. Robert Cargill (Audiobook)
As I said previously, I like Cargill significantly more than I liked the first book of his I read this year, so I came back for more. “Rust” still had its issues, but it had some real peaks and he explored a sci-fi trope (a post-human world) from a unique perspective.

30. “Deadpool and Cable” - Rob Liefield (Book)
The only comic book/graphic novel I read this year (after taking on several last year) was at points very fun and at points extremely disjointed. Some comic collections work well as a whole, some do not. This set was too inconsistent to really hit the mark but I still enjoyed the reading more often than not.

29. “Renegades” - Marissa Meyer (eBook)
I don’t like stepping into a book series without knowing what I’m committing to up front and thus, “Renegades” is sort of a worst-case scenario for me. Between the time I bought the book on sale and actually read it a few months later, it went from what I thought was a one-off to an announced trilogy (the second book dropped at the end of 2018). This book is, on its own, totally passable and solid enough but I’m not sure I cared enough to read the series and yet there are some questions I’d liked to have answered annnnddd I’m trapped.

28. “Moonglow” - Michael Chabon (eBook)
Chabon is a truly GREAT author and his “Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay”, which I read for the first time last year, is a masterpiece. I was very excited for “Moonglow”, billed as part memoir, part family history, but it was a slog to get through. The writing is, of course, excellent, it’s just the story, focusing primarily on Chabon’s maternal grandfather, that drags and drags and drags. Every time I was close to putting it down entirely, however, Chabon rediscovered the better elements of the story and pulled me back in.

27. “Six Years” - Harlan Coben (Audiobook)
Another road trip pick, Coben is a master of the “elevated beach read”, a talented writer who could probably pen the next “great American novel” if he wanted but instead pumps out an annual easy read that’s 15 percent better than most of the paperbacks you find in an airport. (I’m not knocking Coben for this, by the way; he’s a genius and I’m very jealous.) “Six Years” is basically the quintessential Coben: great concept, incredibly competent writing, total cookie-cutter ending that could’ve been predicted within the first 50 pages.

GOOD BOOKS!
26. “A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and a Great War” - Joseph Loconte (Audiobook)
Few authors have had a greater impact on my life than JRR Tolkein and CS Lewis so it’s only natural that I’d enjoy a book about their wartime experiences and post-war friendship. Someday, I’ll get around to the more substantial works on both of their lives but Loconte’s book served as a quality crash course on the both of them and highlighted, at great length, the friendship that propelled them toward greatness.

25. “We Are Legion (We Are Bob)” - Dennis E. Taylor (Audiobook)
“Legion” was a fun read with a quality concept and self-contained enough that I didn’t feel the need to carry on into the rest of the series. I wish that Taylor would’ve cut the pop culture/nerd culture references by 20 percent, however, though I suspect these references are exactly why the series has a strong pull amongst its target audience. After a while, I felt like the Star Trek callbacks and the like were shoehorned and distracted from Taylor’s own worldbuilding which is actually quite good.  

24. “Dead Run” - Dan Schultz (Audiobook)
I don’t read much true crime and when I do, I prefer reporting on the facts of a case rather than an investigation into what might have happened. “Dead Run” fits that bill and Schultz does an excellent job of delving into all parts of this story without allowing the telling to become stale or boring.

23. “When Giants Walked the Earth” - Mick Wall (Audiobook)
Led Zeppelin is my pick for the greatest rock band of all-time and I’ve had this book sitting on my shelf for years. (I am very good at buying large books and very bad at actually reading them, as it turns out.) I finally accepted the inevitable and snagged the audiobook and it was...not a fun read. I knew enough about the respective heydays of Jimmy Page and Robert Plant going in to know what I was getting myself into but there are long stretches of this book I found aggressively unappealing. Still, Wall is a fantastic writer, his research is unparalleled, and I think he tried to keep the book from becoming a full-on celebration of debauchery and bad behavior despite the band’s best efforts to make it so.

22. “Do Over” - Jon Acuff (Audiobook and Book)
I’m not big on self-help/motivational books but I love Acuff so I started reading “Do Over”, like, three years ago hoping it would give me a bit of a push in my writing and podcasting endeavors. I got about two chapters in, had a panic attack, freaked out, and quit. I revisited this year in a much better headspace and with life a little more settled and got a lot out of my reading, including some quality strategies that I’ve used over the last few months. 

21. “The Fold” - Peter Clines (Audiobook)
Like “We Are Legion”, this book came recommended to me by a couple of my most trusted nerd friends and these nerds did not disappoint! I’ve read some Clines previously (not to be confused with Ernest Cline of “Ready Player One” fame) and usually came away more impressed with his ideas than his writing. For me, this was a big step in the right direction and I enjoyed it enough to plan on reading his follow-up this year.

20. “The Boy on the Bridge” - MR Carey (Audiobook)
This is, I believe, the third year in a row in which I have read a book by Carey, who came up as an outstanding comic book writer. “Boy” exists in the same world as Carey’s 2014 novel “The Girl with All The Gifts” (which I HIGHLY recommend) and proves a worthy successor. Carey has a way of conveying dark, heavy material in a sort-of detached manner that keeps the bleakness of his world from weighing down and bumming out the reader, which I greatly appreciate.

19. “The Dry” - Jane Harper (Audiobook)
Far and away the best mystery/thriller I read this year and one that actually kept me in suspense up until the final fourth or so. I dug the setting, I thought the mystery element was both mysterious and interesting, and the reader for the audiobook was excellent. Perhaps a bit predictable in the end but the conclusion was still satisfying in spite of that fact.

VERY GOOD BOOKS
18. “The Princess Diarist” - Carrie Fisher (Audiobook)
I had gone back and forth on whether or not I was going to read “The Princess Diarist”, heartbroken as I was over the loss of American Treasure Carrie Fisher and not one for celebrity relationship tell-alls/gossip/what have you. But a listener recommended and sold me on the audiobook (which was read by Fisher before her death) and I’m glad I bought in because Carrie Fisher was a wholly unique gem and her writing was always her greatest skill. Even when the story drifted into territory I didn’t necessarily care about (and it often did, frankly), Fisher’s self-deprecating wit and her magnificent voice kept me totally engaged.  

17. “Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back)” - Jeff Tweedy (Audiobook)
Turns out I only read two music-related books this year despite my historical predilection to the genre. I’ve always loved Wilco and Tweedy is a fascinating figure to me, stuck somewhere between a surly, 70’s rock-star and a sensitive modern rock-star. “Let’s Go” has grown on me since I read it in the fall, and I’ve come to appreciate some of the aspects I was unsure of during the reading. Plus, I love when a writer reads his/her own book, especially when it’s non-fiction, and Tweedy as the reader here was a serious bonus.

16. “Norse Mythology” - Neil Gaiman (Audiobook)
Something I discovered about myself while reading “Norse”: I have more of an appreciation for mythology (Norse, Greek, or otherwise) than I actually care about mythology. Through the course of this book, I kept finding myself tuning out or choosing to listen to something else entirely despite A.) How INCREDIBLY well-written this book is, B.) How much I LOVE Neil Gaiman, and C.) How much I SUUUUPPPPERRRR love Neil Gaiman’s voice (*Heart eye emoji*). Somewhere along the line, I realized my disconnect with the book was due exclusively to my internal “meh” to classic mythology in general and I had peace.

15. “The Girl Who Drank the Moon” - Kelly Barnhill (Audiobook)
Just about every person in the civilized world has some familiarity and/or appreciation for fairy tales and thus, it’s a genre that receives a lot of attention in literary and film form. What I loved about Barnhill’s approach here is instead of trying to write a “modern fairy tale” or a “play on a fairy tale”, she just wrote a fairy tale! No modern twist, no attempt at being edgy, she just wrote a very good, vibrant, classically-inspired fairy tale and the result is a smashing success in my estimation.

14. “Brilliance” - Marcus Sakey (Audiobook)
As with “Renegades”, I purchased “Brilliance” having no idea it was the first chapter in a series (it’s possible I’m not paying enough attention to my book choices). Unlike “Renegades”, there is no question regarding my interest in carrying on with this series in the future. “Brilliance” borrows from a bevy of similar books and graphic novels that came before it but Sakey’s characters are quite strong and they carry the book through any potential dips in the originality of the story. I expect I’ll finish out this trilogy in the coming year.

13. “Shoe Dog” - Phil Knight (Audiobook)
Recently, a gentleman in a fine dining establishment questioned my political leanings based on the pair of Nikes I was wearing. I can only imagine how angry that person would be if I saw how highly I rated this book. Mostly memoir with a sliver of business strategy worked in, I found “Shoe Dog” riveting from start to finish. My one complaint is the book cuts off in the early 80’s before Nike became NIKE and, frankly, there’s a lot more Knight could’ve gotten into and I wish he had.

12. “Difficult Men” - Brett Martin (Book)
Another one that’s been sitting on my shelf for years, “Difficult Men” delved into the first run of Peak TV programming (The Sopranos, The Wire, The Shield, Deadwood, etc.), the lead characters therein, and the showrunners/creators who brought them to screen. Martin did so with sufficient depth and through the lens of an auteur, letting each man speak for himself rather than interjecting too much in the way of his own personal biases/preference. In doing so, he gives the reader some great insight into each of their respective processes as well as a good sense of who is and is not someone with which you might ever want to hang.

GREAT BOOKS
11. “The Graveyard Book” - Neil Gaiman (Audiobook)
This was my first book of the year which is ironic given that it had been sitting in my Audible unlistened to for at least two full years, maybe three. I mentioned my love for Neil Gaiman earlier and while “Graveyard” is purposefully slighter than some of his grander world building efforts (“Neverwhere” and “American Gods”), it is no less enjoyable or clever. He is a master of story and there is an ease with which his tales float off the page (or off the earbud, as it were) that is almost unmatched. And, again, Gaiman’s voice alone is worth the price of a download here.

10. “The Chris Farley Show” - Tom Farley (Audiobook)
Not the easiest read I took on this year but I’m glad I did. I adored Chris Farley as a youth and I continue to adore the memory of him as a soon-to-be decrepit old man. The oral history format utilized here serves the material very well and gives everyone who had a part in Farley’s life, from high school on up to his untimely death, a chance to be accounted for in their own words. I laughed remembering some of my favorite Farley bits and cried during some of the tougher spots (not always easy to explain to your child why you’re crying while doing the dishes, but he’s pretty much used to it by now). This is a really well-structured book that fully encapsulates its subject’s many highs and devastating lows.

9. “Everybody Always” - Bob Goff (Audiobook and Book)
Bob is hero of mine and one of the most genuine people you could ever hope to meet. His enthusiasm for life and his fellow human beings is unbelievably infectious and that jumps off every single page of “Everybody Always.” Bob’s first book, “Love Does”, got all kinds of press a couple years ago and rightly so but I actually think this book does a better job of inspiring the reader than his previous effort did.  

8. “Basketball (And Other Things)” - Shea Serrano (Book)
I was in the middle of “BAOT” when 2017 came to a close so I carried it over to the New Year and enjoyed every page along the way. I have a bookcase full of sports books and while there are better “basketball books” than this (books that tell an important story or rank the best players in NBA history or follow a team through a significant season or whatever), I’m not sure there are many better “books about basketball”. David Halberstam’s aforementioned “The Breaks of the Game” may very be the greatest basketball book ever written but does it have chapters titled, “If 1997 Karl Malone and a Bear Swapped Places for a Season, Who Would Be More Successful?” (the bear, for sure) or “If You Could Dunk on Any One Person, Who Would It Be?” (Miles Teller, obviously)? No, Halberstam did not write those chapters so, point Serrano.

7. “The Book of Lost Things” - John Connolly (Audiobook)
If I may be honest, I love Audible’s various sales throughout the year but often times, the books I’m able to pick up in these circumstances end up cluttering the back half of my year-end list. (See: numbers 45, 42, 41, 40, and more.) This was the outlier in 2018, a book I picked somewhat half-heartedly and ended up loving. Connolly’s book has touches of “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” with a hint of Gaiman mixed in to make it darker and more epic than both. “Lost Things” is an excellent read that may end up on the elusive re-read list someday in the future.

6. “Conference Room, Five Minutes” - Shea Serrano (eBook)
Pretty bangin’ year for Serrano, assuming he is as pumped to be featured on this very important list as I imagine he is. “Five Minutes” combines two things that I love: pop-culture essays and The Office and the result could not have been more glorious. Any book that begins with a Stanley Hudson “Shove it up your butt” joke jumps straight past “good” and immediately becomes “great” in my view. Also, I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to the person sitting next to me on my flight from Dallas to Phoenix this summer who had to witness me try so hard not to LOL that I ultimately began choking after reading said Stanley Hudson joke.

5. “The Name of the Wind” - Patrick Rothfuss (Audiobook)
There are nerds and then there are high fantasy nerds. I’ve often been the former but never really the latter as I’ve typically kept my reading to the shallow end of the fantasy pool. For example, I did not read “Game of Thrones” until after the show began and I’ve never picked up a Terry Brooks tome. This was something different for me, then, and I highly enjoyed this reading. Rothfuss’ worldbuilding (probably the last time I’ll use that term for this list, sorry) is exquisite and his connection to his lead characters is evident from the very early stages of the book. “Wind” is also a little more accessible than other high fantasy novels I’ve picked up over the years; it’s not Rowling-accessible, mind you, but perhaps Tolkein-accessible and that’s enough for this nerd. 

4. “X” - Chuck Klosterman (eBook)
Klosterman is one of my very favorite authors and I tend to gravitate toward his essays more than his book-length work. I’d put off reading “X” for over a year because I thought of it as a sort-of greatest hits album and assumed I’d read most, or all, of the works collected therein. Well, number one, I was wrong; there were plenty of entries in this collection that I’d never read before. And number two, even those that I had read were just as interesting and engrossing the second time around as they were in their respective original formats. Klosterman’s unique questions and thought process surrounding virtually any subject he approaches makes even the most common celebrity interview, usually a total tune-out for me, a must-read.

3. “Children of Time” - Adrian Tchaikovsky (Audiobook)
I continue to think of sci-fi as my favorite genre (at least on the fiction side of things) but I am often disappointed or nonplussed by the sci-fi I read. While I quite enjoyed “Brilliance”, “The Fold”, and others, “Children of Time” was the big winner in the sci-fi category this year and likely would remain at the top in most years. It’s a complex story told in three parts spanning across space and time and yet, Tchaikovsky is able to not only hold the reader’s attention rapt, he keeps the book on track, never letting it get lost in its own complexities. It’s dense sci-fi, to be sure, but it’s dense because the story calls for it, not just for the sake of being dense. So, while I can’t say it’s an easy read, it is a supremely good read that is just as strong in execution as it is in concept.  

2. “Hi, Bob!” - Bob Newhart (Audiobook)
Seeing as how I am a living human being who has a heart, I love American Treasure Bob Newhart and I value his influence on comedy as highly as any other contributor of the last 50 years. “Hi, Bob!” is a short, easy listen (it is only available via audiobook) that plays more like a longform podcast than anything else and allows him the opportunity to talk to other very funny people (Will Ferrell, Lisa Kudrow, Conan O’Brien, etc.) about comedy, life, and everything in between. The reverence that each comedian has for Newhart is palpable, but these are real conversations between peers and the dynamic works so beautifully.

1. “Hits and Misses” - Simon Rich (eBook)
My favorite read of the year by leaps and bounds. Rich is an actual, literal, comedic genius who has authored some of the funniest short and longform stories (not to mention scripts) of the last decade. But “Hits and Misses” is his masterpiece. Every story in this collection is a good one but the peaks are absolutely brilliant and truly hilarious. I’m not a particularly fast reader as most of my actual “eyes on page/screen” reading comes late at night after everything else is done and I’ve usually only got a few minutes to spare. But I read “Hits and Misses” in two, maybe three sittings total, including once when I tried to read in bed while Lindsey slept and ultimately resulted in my leaving the room because I couldn’t stop cackling out loud. I know I can be prone to hyperbole, but I genuinely cannot remember ever laughing as hard and as frequently while reading a book as I did with “Hits and Misses” and I imagine I will revisit the better stories many times again in the future.

"I Just Want to Be Like You"

I, like probably three billion people worldwide, have plantar fasciitis. This is not a surprise given how much I am on my feet, how much basketball I have played (poorly) in my life, and how little care I have given to rest and rehabilitation after the various injuries that pop up as a result of said poorly played basketball. One day, I woke up and my foot hurt. The next day, I woke up and my foot was immobile. The day after that, I woke up and went to the doctor and told the doctor, “I think I have plantar fasciitis” and he said, “Yes, you definitely have plantar fasciitis.” And that was that.

The impact of this supremely lame and extremely common diagnosis on my life is twofold.

One, I had to get rid of a lot of my sneakers. I love sneakers; if I was wealthy, I would be one of those people who has a closet full of sneakers displayed on lighted racks. But many of my sneakers didn’t fit right post-diagnosis or did not take to the inserts I have to wear in my shoes at all times now, so they were sold or given away or thrown away, each loss requiring a small funeral-like ceremony. I guess my ability to walk when I am 50 is worth giving up my favorite pair of Nikes but it’s a closer call than you might think.

The second change in my life is that I now wear my shoes pretty much all of the time. The combination of my stupid plantar fasciitis and the terrible laminate floors we currently have in our house leaves me limping if I walk around without shoes for very long. I cannot fix my feet without surgery and we do not own this house so I cannot change the flooring and, thus, if I am not in bed or in the shower, I have my shoes on. Again, this is a very minor inconvenience in the grand scheme of things (or even the not-grand scheme of things, really), just a thing I have to deal with like everyone has things that they just have to deal with, until hopefully someday I can afford robot feet.

But, because my son notices everything, he makes note of my shoe wearing with great regularity. When I put my shoes on (or change from one pair to another as I do frequently to alleviate pressure points), he is consistently very quick to ask me if I’m going somewhere. “No, buddy, just doing the dishes and need my shoes on” or “Nah, pal, my feet just hurt.” Sometimes I plop down on the couch next to him with my shoes up on the coffee table and he immediately points them out like, “Dad, your shoes are still on.” “I know, dude, but I gotta do something in a bit, I just want to sit with you for a few minutes.”

For a while, this struck him as sheer lunacy. Coop is one of the world’s great loungers. When he gets home from school, he changes into athletic shorts the second he walks in the door. He has always been very quick to assemble “comfy” spaces for himself at the expense of anyone else in the house, building “hideouts” out of every pillow and couch cushion we will let him use. To him, the idea of keeping your shoes on when you’re not up running around borders on sacrilege. He’s almost offended that I would dare sit near his newest hideout without having the decency to take off my shoes.

Recently, though, on a lazy Saturday or Sunday, I started putting my shoes on in order to do some chores or whatever and noticed that he was putting his sneakers on as well.

“Hey man,” I said, smiling over at him. “We’re not going anywhere. You can keep chilling. I’ve got some cleaning to do is all.” 

“I know,” he replied as he went about the business of putting on his socks and shoes.

“Why’re you putting your shoes on, then?”

“I just want to be like you.” 

There are few phrases and sentences that will stop you short, that will warm your heart, that will make you take pride in what you’re doing quite like that one. My favorite video of Cooper is from the morning after the Force Awakens trailer dropped and I got to wake up my kid into a world that offered him new Star Wars and recorded his reaction to the trailer. But my second favorite video ever (and, I must say, there are a LOT of great Cooper videos because this kid rules) is one Lindsey shot over our post-church lunch a couple years ago wherein Coop tells me when he grows up, he wants to be a coach “just like you” and suggests that maybe we should coach together. When I am feeling like not the greatest parent (often! Because parenting is hard!), I watch that video because it reminds me that at least on some level, I am doing some things right. Coop doesn’t really care about sports, not yet, and maybe not ever, so I know that his desire to coach (however fleeting it may end up being) has very little to do with his love for the game and very much to do with his love for me. 

For the next few hours, I worked around the house on various chores, projects, organizations, and re-organizations and Cooper did not. He did not clean or work on a project or re-organize a shelf. He sat, and he watched TV, and he played with toys and a few times he moved from one hideout location to another. But he kept his shoes on because he just wanted to be like me.

There’s an episode of Boy Meets World where Cory is upset (as he often was) that he doesn’t have any special skills or abilities and accuses his father of letting him down. “I’m average because you’re average,” he charges Alan (the greatest TV dad of all-time, by the way). The focus of the episode is about Cory coming to grips with his lack of self-confidence and learning to appreciate his father. But I’ve always thought the real strength of the episode comes from Alan who, while hurt by his son’s lack of respect, acknowledges that coming from where he came from, “if my son thinks average is nothing then I’ve done my job.”

And that’s me to a t. I’m so happy and proud that my son and I are best buddies, that he wants to be like me so badly that he’ll spend three hours wearing shoes inside his sacrosanct hideout just so we match. But I don’t want him to stop there. I want him to take some of the things he will have hopefully learned from me (work ethic, loyalty, “humor”, etc.) and apply it to himself in ways I have never been able to manage; that he will be more patient than I am, that he will be kinder than me, that he will find direction sooner than I did, that he will be more successful than me (in whatever form that shows itself), etc. I want him to be better than me and if someday that means he stops wanting to be like me because he’s already surpassed me, if he sees me as the crude model on which he built his much stronger, better self, then I believe I will have done my job.

I just hope he has the money to buy his old man some new robot feet.

"I Hear Everything"

In the months before my son was born, my friend, Tobin, was going through a divorce and needed a place to crash. So he crashed with us and every other week, so did his four-year-old son, Jude. We loved having them around and it was good training for parenthood. I’m not “Walk around the house naked guy” or “Yell obscenities at every hour of the night guy” but obviously it’s a big transition going from “no kids” to “one or more kids” in your house and Jude gave us (read: “me”) a sort-of trial run on having a kid around the house who didn’t go somewhere else at the end of the evening.

Jude had a lot of energy (duh) but he was also content being the only kid in the midst of a group of adults and was great at disappearing into his own thing, whether it was an iPad or toys or even a book, when the occasion called for it. I learned a lot about having your kids around other adults in settings that were not specifically geared toward kids and Lindsey and I have carried that forward with Cooper. I think it’s important, on a number of levels, that he learns how to interact with his elders and I’m not sure that would have been such an immediate priority for me had I not sat in a room with 10 adults, and one four-year-old, dozens of times over those pre-Cooper months.

In this setting, Jude would kinda tune out and leave the adults to our nonsense with the very pointed, incredibly consistent exception on one very specific thing: No matter what he was doing, where he was in the house, or how quietly you spoke, if you said the word “stupid”, he would immediately perk up and chide you. “Don’t say stupid,” he’d say, eyes darting up just long enough to make it clear that he was not messing around. You could say LITERALLY any other word and he’d go on with whatever he was doing unphased; you could mock his dad mercilessly (a favorite pastime of mine), you could blare Kanye, you could deliver a perfect reading of the first 20 minutes of The Departed, everything else was on the table. But if you said “stupid” you would HEAR ABOUT IT without fail. It got to the point where if someone did utter the magic “s” word, his face would sink and the rest of us would glance over at Jude, waiting for his rebuke. He never let us down and I still give Tobin grief about it to this day.

I am now reaping the karmic rewards of that which I have sown.

Cooper is a super observant kid. From an early age, you could tell he was taking everything in and processing whatever was happening around him. And he never forgets anything (except how to put away his dirty clothes). He listens to what we say and we try very, very hard to include him in conversation, ask him questions, and engage him in what we’re doing and usually he goes right along with it. The general exception to this is the car. When we’re in the car, there are things he pays attention to and notices, but it’s usually tied more to routine and landmarks. If I take a different route home from my parent’s house, he’ll ask why we didn’t turn where we usually do and if we happen to pass a random building that he’s seen before, he’ll comment on how this is near something or some place that he visited once some months or years previously. But for the most part, in the car, he kinda tunes us out unless we’re specifically engaging him. And even then, he’s prone to saying, “I don’t want to talk right now” and returning his gaze to the window. I respect it.

Recently, though, he let us in on his big secret. Lindsey and I were talking about something (I don’t remember the specifics; work, friends, family, my grief over the impending end of Dirk Nowitzki’s playing career, whatever, take your pick) and Cooper asked, “What does that mean?” I glanced back at him and asked if he was listening to our conversation. His reply chilled me to my bones. 

“I hear EVERYTHING,” he said somewhat emphatically.

“Are you telling me you’re just sitting back there all quiet listening to everything we say?” I asked, half-amused and half-thinking-back-on-everything-I-had-said-in-the-last-15-minutes.

“Yes. I always do that. I. Hear. Ev. Er. Y. Thing.”

He smiled at me in a manner that suggested he knew EXACTLY what kind of bombshell he’d just dropped on us then went back to staring at the window, a satisfactory grin on his little gremlin face. Meanwhile, Lindsey and I shrugged nervously at each other, “Welp, can’t put that genie back in the bottle.” And look, it’s not like we’re throwing around f-bombs or trashing our friends behind their backs (I usually just trash them to their faces) or whatever else might be truly damaging to a child. We both worked with kids for years before we ever had our own and anyway, we tend to keep things pretty mild in our conversations regardless of the presence of tiny ears. But still, we thought the car was a safe place given how completely zoned out this kid has consistently been for the bulk of his life and lo and behold, we were playing right into his hands.

So, if you hear our kid calling someone a moron in traffic (me) or ranting about the menu changes at Taco Bueno (Lindsey) or marveling at the sheer stupidity of the DC Extended Universe (me) or saying one of those words that’s not really, exactly a curse word per se but definitely isn’t a mom-friendly-word (me again), that’s our bad. Just know that we didn’t know he “hears EVERYTHING” until just this second and we’ll try to better in the future.

And, don’t say stupid.

"I Have Them Now" and Other Creepy Things Kids Say

Kids are creepy. Okay, maybe I should say, kids say creepy stuff. Really creepy stuff. We love the kids that say the creepy stuff. But still, the creepy stuff they say sticks with us. I’m around a lot of kids and I have heard a lot of creepy stuff over the years. Whether it’s Coop, a friend’s kid, a kid at work, or the occasional random stranger kid who just seems to appear out of nowhere in a store aisle, says something weird, then disappears, leaving you to wonder if you have just seen a ghost, I have found the creepy stuff they say usually results in one of four reactions. These reactions are illustrated by the following gifs, each reaction escalating in seriousness.

1. THE “WAIT, WUUUTTT??”
A friend of ours has a child who, as the family drove past a power line that was lined with black birds, shoulder to shoulder, calmly called out the number of birds in sight. Like, he very casually said, “Yeah there’s 673 birds up there” and less in a Rain Man way than in a way that suggested he had trackers on all of the birds and kept a tally in his journal at home. It was weird.

2. THE “SILENT BLINK”
Recently, as we walked into a Target together, I noticed Cooper was extending his hand toward every bird we passed in the parking lot and making a sort of “whooshing” sound. When I asked him what he was doing, he said, simply, and matter-of-factly as if this was a very normal thing to do and say, “I have them now.” Wait, what? “I have them now,” he repeated. And then he smiled, and we proceeded into Target. So…I guess my son has the ability to pull the souls out of Parking Lot Birds and I’m not sure what to do about that. If you have any advice on this, please let me know.

3. THE “DISCOMBOBULATED HOLD UP, WHAT NOW?”
When Cooper was younger, he would occasionally say that he had been to a place he had never been to. We’d be driving by a random location and he’d say, “Oh, yeah, I’ve been to that park before” or, “That’s the McDonald’s I went to last week.” We’d argue with him a bit but he was adamant about these supposed experiences and finally, after some extensive prodding, he revealed to us that he had been to these locations with “Schmike”, who, we think (I should stress the “think” part of this because who knows really?) was an imaginary friend. The creepy part was the Schmike only visited at night when Cooper was already in bed and he has some facial deformity that Cooper was vague about and, oh yeah, I forgot, sometimes they VISITED A GRAVEYARD WHAT IS HAPPENING?!? 

4. THE “SCREAM AND DIE”
Before we had a child, we spent a lot of time with our friend’s kids and one set of kids in particular. At some point, one of these children began talking about “Ty Thomas” who, like Schmike, we assumed was an imaginary friend. There were only two real differences between Ty Thomas and Schmike:

A.) This kid would commune with Ty Thomas at any point during the day or night, sometimes stopping while playing to wave at Ty Thomas who was apparently JUST HANGING OUT IN THE CORNER OF THE ROOM WHILE WE ALL ATE;
B.) We found out after a while that Ty Thomas was the name of a child who previously lived in the neighborhood…UNTIL HE DIED!!! There’s nothing that will stop down a friendly game night quicker than a child waving to a DEAD CHILD that only he can see and also, I’m pretty sure Ty Thomas is still with us and will be haunting us for the rest of our days.

So, here’s to all the creepy kids and the creepy things they say that keep us on our toes and up at night, unable to sleep for fear of Ty Thomas’ retribution. You’re the worst, kids.

Spider-Man Villains Ranked

Venom opens in theaters worldwide today and I, for one, am incredibly excited to see it. Just kidding, this movie features the worst trailer I have ever seen with my own two eyes and I’m questioning my existence as a movie podcaster, knowing that I’ll soon have to watch this movie. Even still, 2018 is a big year for the Spider-Man Cinematic Universe, what with Infinity War, Venom, and the December release of Into the Spider-Verse. Spidey is a big player in my house as my son fluctuates from day to day between wanting to be Spider-Man and wanting to be Black Panther. (I’d rather him be something like Engineer Man or Accountant Man or just “Isn’t Crippled by Student Debt Man” but so it goes.) He watches the various Spider-Man movies quite frequently and as such, I have become an expert on this disjointed series both willingly (Homecoming) and unwillingly (Spider-Man 3 which will very likely be the death of me). With Venom now upon us, let’s have a look at the nine villains that have propagated the Spidey Verse thus far.

10. The Rhino, The Amazing Spider-Man 2
9. Green Goblin, The Amazing Spider-Man 2
You may be saying, “How could the AM2 villains POSSIBLY be any worse than the various villains Spider-Man 3 brought to the table, you cretin?” And you might be right, honestly, except that I have seen Amazing 2 a half-dozen times (thanks, Cooper) and when I IMDB’d this movie to make sure I wasn’t forgetting anything, I discovered that I had, in fact, completely and totally forgotten that BOTH OF THESE VILLAINS WERE EVEN IN THE MOVIE!!! In my book, it is worse to be completely and totally forgettable as a villain than it is to be outright bad. (My book is called, “Very Weird Takes About Movie Villains.” A NYT bestseller, to be sure.) I’m also docking points for Dane DeHaan playing Green Goblin instead of Hobgoblin as he should have been. You can’t just change which Osborn is which Goblin without me taking notice, Marc Webb.

8. Venom/The Alien Simbiote, Spider-Man 3
7. Sandman, Spider-Man 3
6. Hobgoblin, Spider-Man 3
Woof. One of the greatest disappointments in blockbuster movie history, there are a ton of reasons why SM3 failed miserably beyond just the villains (the jazz club scene alone probably could’ve sunk Citizen Kane). But the villains certainly didn’t help. For one thing, three villains is way too many villains (a lesson that Amazing Spider-Man 2 did NOT learn despite how hard my brain apparently tried to erase this fact); maybe you can do the Villain Ensemble thing but it’s always iffy and in this case, all three villains were supposed to be established as their own characters, not a cohesive, villainous whole. Beyond this overstuffing, however, the real issue is all three of these characters suck. Harry Osbourne/Hobgoblin perpetually streaks across the screen like the worst PS2 video game creation of all-time, Sandman is hamstrung by a pathetically pandering backstory (not to mention Thomas Hayden Church’s big bag of nothing), and the simbiote’s big move is to make Tobey Maguire play jazz piano poorly.  

5. Electro, The Amazing Spider-Man 2
To be frank, Electro lands here more by default than anything else. He’s an odd character, his backstory is odd, and Jamie Foxx’s portrayal is odder still. If I were given five minutes with Mr. Foxx, I’d like to tell you I’d appropriately ask him what he was going for here and dig into the genesis of character interpretation and stuff but really I’d just spend the entire five minutes ranting about how he showed up at the Mavs’ championship parade in 2011 then also at the Miami championship parade in 2012. “Did you really think you could get away with this, Jamie?! NOTHING GETS BY ME, JAMIE!!!” Dallas Mavericks digression aside, this is a very mediocre, forgettable villain in a very mediocre, forgettable move but at least the character looked cool in its mediocrity.

4. The Lizard, The Amazing Spider-Man
In hindsight, The Lizard is a relatively obscure villain with which to relaunch a franchise that the average moviegoer didn’t even realize needed to be relaunched. Sony’s blundering efforts to transition from the Maguire Spider-Man films to the Garfield Spider-Man films was a mess and yet, the villain stands out as a high point. Rhys Ifans’ performance in the Dr. Jekyll side of this character is interesting and more nuanced than you might expect. Meanwhile, the scale of the CGI of the Mr. Hyde side of the equation makes for a competent rival for Spidey that verges on effectively creepy in certain spots. There’s a lot I don’t care for within Sam Raimi’s film sensibilities, but I think his horror background would’ve served this character well had he been in the director’s chair. Still, this is a good villain who for large stretches outshines the protagonist.

3. Green Goblin, Spider-Man
There are two parts to the Green Goblin equation: The action sequences which were neutered by Raimi’s dedication to camp and look horrendous in 2018 and Willem Dafoe’s equally campy but somehow extremely effective performance. I am genuinely weirded out by Willem Dafoe but he can be a very good actor in the right situations and this is one of those situations. The movie itself might hold up better with a different, subtler, less creepy actor in this role (like, say, virtually anyone) but as it pertains specifically to this character in a vacuum, Dafoe is excellent jumping across the Schizophrenic divide between the respective buttoned-up business man and stark raving mad lunatic sides of Norman Osborn.   

2. Doctor Octopus, Spider-Man 2
Doc Ock popped up at the very beginning of the comic book movie surge and remains one of the real peaks amongst the superhero movie villain mountain range. Whereas Dafoe’s over-the-top campiness (and its fit to Raimi’s themes) are what made Green Goblin work, it is the exact opposite here: Alfred Molina delivered a grounded performance with only a hint of madness and that, combined with the fantastic effects that gave life to the mechanical limbs, makes Doc Ock pop off the screen. Molina leans slightly against the currents of Raimi’s worst tendencies and the result is a compelling villain, not to mention a movie that holds up significantly better than most of the action movies of the era. He’s a great foe for Spider-Man and gives Spider-Man 2 the weight that both of its surrounding movies in the franchise lacked.

1. Vulture, Spider-Man: Homecoming
This was one of my favorite performances of 2017 and I think it will stand the test of time in regard to its place in the Superhero Movie Villain Pantheon. We’ve seen the “Everyman” trope applied to heroes many times but it’s rare for a villain to get that treatment (at least in superhero movies) and Keaton was the PERFECT casting choice. Vulture is intelligent, determined, and principled and that makes him a terrifying opponent for a grounded superhero like Homecoming’s Spider-Man. Keaton’s gritty approach adds real, tangible substance to the character. He’s not crazy, he’s not out to rule the world, he’s not even evil; he’s just a family man working to provide for his family, which is exactly why he’s dangerous. This is great character design taken to new heights by the performer, a brilliant pairing that should serve as the example for all superhero movies to come.