Judd Apatow’s humor is my kind of humor. Actually, I should preface that some. The movies that Apatow directs (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, This Is 40, Funny People, Trainwreck) are my kind of humor. The films that he is merely a producer for are hit or miss. While I love Kicking and Screaming, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Step Brothers, Bridesmaids, Get Him to the Greek, and The Big Sick, there are just as many of his produced films that I am not a fan of, most notably Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. If anything, I wish I would stop producing altogether and spend more time writing and stepping behind the camera.
Category Archives: 2020
The Forgotten Battle (2020)
Take a few pieces of Dunkirk, add a touch of All Quiet on the Western Front, layer in some 1917, shave in some Saving Private Ryan sprinkle, and finish it with some Letters from Iwo Jima. The result is Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.’s ( The Thing) 2020 under-the-radar masterpiece, The Forgotten Battle. This 2020 Netflix film was one that I had just heard of after completing my watch of All Quiet on the Western Front, which was another Netflix original that was equally as exceptional.
Riders of Justice (2020)
In a year when movies have been the worst of my lifetime, I have been pleasantly surprised by the originality of the three most recent films I have seen. Jockey, A Hero, and Anders Thomas Jensen Riders of Justice gave the year a late jolt of hope that the year can amount to something more. However, it may be too late with only a dozen or so movies left to see (and even fewer than I am excited to see). Different from the first two movies, Riders of Justice, while a neat little film, won’t finish in my end-of-year top ten, which is something that I believe Jockey and A Hero will.
Worth (2020)
More often than not, movies that attempt to capitalize on the tragedy of real-life events have mountains to climb over that other movies don’t even have to navigate. The greater the tragedy (at least when it comes to the loss of human life), the closer the attempt to reap any profit from the tragedy through music, literature, art, film, or other types of storytelling expression to the actual event itself presents an even steeper cliff to escalate.
Another Round (2020)
Thomas Vinterberg (The Hunt, The Command) turned heads when he received his first Best Director Academy Award nomination for the little-known but well-received Another Round, the 2020 Best International Feature Film winner. There were some excellent candidates for Best Director in 2015, but Vinterberg wasn’t necessarily in that discussion.
I had this movie at the top of my queue to watch for more than six months before I finally watched it on a recent plane ride. It’s a Denmark movie, and I haven’t been doing great in recent years with subtitled films, especially when watching at home. A long plane ride was the perfect opportunity to focus on my laptop with some headphones on. The movie earned 92% critics and 90% audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes. Those scores were both pretty high. Another Round, while original, was nothing special. It wasn’t so much that it was uninteresting. It just wasn’t memorable at all. It also had numerous things that could have been improved, including plenty of continuity questions. I don’t doubt that there were many international films from 2020 and that this one received much of its acclaim and fanfare because of its director and lead actor.