The 2021 Pre-Oscars Movie List

Here we go again. Another strange year in cinema, where the existential question of what it even means to BE a movie is open for discussion. Case in point — the most powerful and absorbing filmic experience of 2021 was Peter Jackson’s Beatles documentary “Get Back.” Was that eight-hour, three-part, mind-blowing experience a “movie” or “TV show”? Dunno. But because it was really neither, it’s not on this list nor on my post of top TV shows either (which can be read here).

We can obviously blame some of the year’s weirdness on the pandemic. You couldn’t even GO to the movies for the first third of 2021 and even when they allowed you in the theatre, you practically needed to wear a Hazmat suit. But a bigger problem is that consumers have just gotten out the habit of treating the movies as a social experience to be shared with other human beings. It’s just so much easier and cheaper to stream a movie at home, so why go out?

I respect that Old Hollywood is doing what it can to hang on, and that it held back some of its most highly anticipated would-be blockbusters for the big screen. But most of them — “West Side Story” and that James Bond movie, for example — ended up being well-made and beautifully shot disappointments.

What’s also distorted about this list is that I didn’t even see most of last year’s best movies until calendar year 2022, which is why I waited to publish this until a week before the Oscars. Unless you lived in Manhattan or Hollywood it was hard to see them in 2021, since many producers delayed their releases in the mostly vain hope that they’d generate some late-year Oscar buzz.

Having said that, I’m reasonably happy with the what I did manage to see this year. I really like my Top Five movies, which makes me hopeful that there’s still a little life left in the old art form. Fingers crossed that the pandemic is really over now and that grown-up movie lovers will return to theaters.

1. Licorice Pizza

The protagonist is named Gary. Need I say more? Set in Hollywood during the early 1970s oil embargo, Gary is an aging child star, a cany entrepreneur, and a 15-year-old romantic who has his eyes set on a woman ten years his senior. Everyone understands this is weird and maybe even illegal but it’s still endearing. And to be honest, I too am in love with Alana Haim, the object of his desire, so I get it. The other great thing about Licorice Pizza is that it’s the funniest film of the year, despite technically not being a comedy.

2. CODA

I almost made this my number one pick but decided that Licorice Pizza was more interesting, even though CODA was the movie that produced the tears. CODA stands for Child Of Deaf Adults and the protagonist is a high school senior forced to chose between staying home to support her family’s fishing business or going to college to pursue a vocal career. It’s more than a bit manipulative but who cares? Sometimes it just feels so good to be manipulated.

3. Tick Tick Boom

Before Jonathan Larson created “Rent,” he wrote another (unproduced) musical — Tick Tick Boom — about being a starving artist in New York City during the worst of the AIDS crisis. Now directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the movie is surprisingly innovative, so although the songs are not familiar the musical is still engaging. And to be honest, even if you weren’t a struggling artist at age 30, you probably were a struggling something, which makes this deeply affecting.

4. Belfast

Kenneth Branagh’s coming of age story about a boy in Protestant Ulster during the North Ireland “troubles.” His dad is targeted by the Provos for being insufficiently anti-Catholic and the story revolves around the question of whether the family will move from the home they love. But even as the bombs go off around him, the young, seemingly untraumatized, Branagh stand-in is having a charmed childhood, like something out of James Joyce. So when the movie is not tense it’s very sweet.

5. Summer of Soul

Terrific documentary about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, which featured Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, Nina Simone, The Fifth Dimension, the Staple Singers, Gladys Night and the Pips, Sly and the Family Stone and the Chambers Brothers. Obviously the music is fantastic and the flashback to 1969 is always welcome.

6. In the Heights

Before Lin-Manuel Miranda created “Hamilton,” there was “In the Heights,” a remarkably conventional Broadway show about life in New York’s Washington Heights. The film, directed by “Crazy Rich Asians” director John M. Chu, is a highly romanticized view of urban life. Why would anyone ever want to leave? The exuberant musical numbers are the highlight, followed by the very likeable stars.

7. Dune

This is “Star Wars” for adults. No jokes and don’t get attached to any character because almost everyone dies. It’s more visually beautiful than “Star Wars,” and the world-building in more believable. On the other hand, while not impossible, it’s pretty hard to follow the plot without having read the book first. Subtitles would have helped a lot.

8. West Side Story

I was more conflicted over this than any other movie this year. Every single musical number was thrillingly beautiful, which made me regret that Steven Spielberg didn’t make more musicals, but while I was watching it, I couldn’t help but wonder why this movie needed to be remade. The original was pretty terrific. What’s next? “The Sound of Music” with Taylor Swift?

9. Free Guy

What happens when a character in a video game starts to develop self-awareness and intelligence? This extremely clever premise powers “Free Guy,” with Ryan Reynolds as “Guy,” an initially clueless bank teller who thinks every day is great until there’s a glitch in the program. Consequence-free action and amusement ensues. This is very professionally produced entertainment.

10. Cry Macho

Clint Eastwood, a retired ranch hand, is hired by his old boss to find his young son in Mexico and return him to Texas. From decades of watching Eastwood movies, we know that Clint is a softy and will develop feelings for the boy. There will also be car chases, some horse-whispering, family drama and even an age-appropriate romance for Clint. It is astonishing that this guy is still directing and starring in movies at 90 years old!

11. The Mitchells vs. the Machines

One of those animated movies that’s kind of for adults and kind of for kids, “M vs M” envisions a world in which a Jeff Bezos-like megalomaniac unleashes all the robots in creation to take over the world. Standing in the way is one slightly dysfunctional family that pulls together to save humanity. This has the same antic energy and emotional power of “Toy Story,” except that in this case the lump in the throat comes from the prospect of the older daughter heading off to college.

12. Power of the Dog

Who let the dog out of the closet? By far the weirdest movie of the year, with Benedict Cumberbatch as a psychologically twisted co-owner of a massive cattle ranch who makes life miserable for everyone when his brother takes a widow as his bride. There’s some serious sexual dysfunction happening here and yet it’s compelling and absorbing. I do not get why this captured so many Academy Award nominations and is the favorite to win.

13. King Richard

A very ordinary sports movie about the rise of Venus and Serena Williams with all the usual cliches. Richard Williams, played by Will Smith, is their hard-charging dad, who is a pain in the ass to the stuffy tennis establishment. Like all sports movies, this is inspirational. There are hardships to overcome, especially the fact that the family comes from Black Compton and not the white, country club-strewn suburbs. Of course the problem with valorizing a monomaniacal sports dad like Richard Williams is that it inspires the millions of other sports dads who think THEIR kids are also sports prodigies.

14. Being the Ricardos

Aaron Sorkin knows how to weave together a handful of actual facts to form a narrative that contains a semblance of truth without all the messy nuances that might complicate the story. So what we have here is a week in the life of Lucy and Desi in which: 1) Lucy is accused of being a communist, and 2) Lucy finds proof of Desi’s infidelities. Both these things happened in real life, but in one week and in such a tidy fable? Probably not. Nicole Kidman is OK with her Lucy impersonation. Javier Bardem lacks Desi’s charm and charisma.

15. Drive My Car

This plot — famous actor/director mourns the death of his wife, produces Uncle Vanya, broods a lot, stares out the window at the frozen landscape as he’s being driven to someone else’s sad memory — would have been perfect for Ingmar Bergman. It’s lovely and meditative but not for the impatient.

16. No Time to Die

Jerry Seinfeld has a funny joke — “If you have a license to kill, and every girl in the world wants to go to bed with you, how about a smile once in a while?” I find myself increasingly bored with Bond; not only can I barely follow the plot but where’s the fun? Obviously this is well produced with excellent car chases, but we can lose everything in between. Also, the ending? That would be a hard no.

17. The Truffle Hunters

I have a special affection for this gentle documentary about the elderly residents of a small Italian town who search for truffles in the forest because it was the first movie I saw at my beloved Avon Theatre when it reopened after phase one of the pandemic. It’s a trifle of a movie, a bagatelle really, but still a pleasure.

18. Limbo

I’m astonished to watch the trailer after having seen the film and discover they were pitching it as a comedy. In reality, I felt sad from the first frame. Omar is a Syrian refugee caught in bureaucratic limbo in Scotland. He desperately needs to gain official legal standing so he can work and begin a new life. He’s a mope and who can blame him, spending his days in lame ESL class and wandering the countryside. Yet he’s one of the lucky ones. There are tens of millions of refugees that never even make it to the West.

19. The Worst Person in the World

Julie, a lovely thirtysomething Dane with unfocused artistic aspirations, can’t decide what to do with her career or love life. To me, as an older adult, the stakes seem small, since you know she’ll figure it out. Yet Julie’s situation also feels real since some people really do feel lost in their twenties (see Tick Tick Boom above).

20. The Velvet Underground

The Velvet Underground were just a little before my time so until now I never really understood why they were so important to the development of Rock ‘n Roll. So thanks, documentarians, for educating me. I also really enjoyed flashing back to the downtown scene in the early 1960s, when underground culture seemed to be so vibrant and was on the verge of going mainstream.

21. Listening to Kenny G

Quite a thought-provoking documentary on what makes Kenny G one of the most popular musicians in the world. The guy does have an amazing story, but at the risk of being one of the snobs called to task in the documentary, a little bit of Kenny G goes a long way.

22. Good on Paper

One of the few purported romcoms of the year, this is actually an anti-romcom. There’s no emotional pay-off, just frustration. Folks, here’s a hint about romance, investment opportunities, and house-hunting: if something looks too good to be true, it usually is.

23. Don’t Look Up

Wow, what a lot of talent to waste on a garbage movie. Leo, J. Law, Meryl, Timothee, Cate, Ariana, that guy who played Cromwell in Wolf Hall. Ostensibly a hard-hitting satire on government and the media, as well as an allegory on climate change, this would-be comedy forgot to be funny or even plausible.

24. The French Dispatch

I wanted to walk out of this movie after five minutes but since I’d paid for tickets I stayed until the end. This extremely arch and self-satisfied depiction of a New Yorker-like magazine based in France is Wes Anderson at his whimsical worst. I wanted to pluck my eyes out. And yet somehow it made it onto many critics’ Top Ten lists. As Wallace Shawn said in The Princess Bride, “inconceivable!!!!”

Chapter 1 of “Fortunate One”

This is the “hospital” where I was born

Today is my birthday so I thought I’d post the chapter from my memoir “Fortunate One: From Nantucket to the White House” that describes my birth. The book is available on Amazon here:

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On the day of my birth—13 months into the Eisenhower presidency and six months before Elvis released his first hit record—my very pregnant mother woke up feeling so odd that she stayed home instead of driving out to milk the cows. Only 21 years old, she and my 22-year-old father owned a small dairy about five miles out of town on the flat and then-deserted south shore of Nantucket Island. Yes, in those days, Nantucket had a dairy farmer, and that farmer was my father.

Early in her pregnancy, my mother asked her doctor when she should go to the hospital. His answer? “You’ll know.” This was in the benighted days before “What to Expect” books, Lamaze classes, and sonograms, but he was right. As the day of March 5th, 1954 wore on, she did, in fact, know that the time had come.

Returning from his milking duties at noon, my father discovered what he surely must have suspected when he left a few hours earlier—that his young wife was in the early stages of labor. My mother, not knowing when she’d eat again, prepared a robust lunch that they ate together, and then, after one last cigarette to calm her nerves, asked to be driven to the hospital.

Her destination—the original Nantucket Cottage Hospital—was neither a cottage nor a hospital as we’d understand the terms today. Imagine your grandmother’s house, but outfitted with a few hospital beds and some medical equipment. That’s what this was, a rudimentary medical facility created in 1912 out of a pair of weathered two-story 18th century houses. Connecting these former dwellings was a passageway that served as entrance, lobby, business center, and reception area. Turn right from the front door and you’d end up in the nurses’ residence; turn left and you’d enter the medical care part of the facility.

My mother had been born in this very building two decades earlier—delivered in fact by the same physician, Dr. Ernest Menges, who met her there later that afternoon. Not much about birth rituals had changed since my mother’s own birth, especially the role of fathers. In keeping with the iron law of mid-century obstetrics, my father’s participation in the birthing process consisted solely of depositing his wife at the front desk. With that task successfully accomplished, there was nothing else for him to do but drive back to the farm for the afternoon milking and pensively await the phone call announcing whether he’d become the proud father of a girl or a boy.

The hospital staff directed my mother from the front desk to a small room across the hall where she herself had been born. This chamber was used by two types of patients: women in labor and terminal patients who were not expected to live long; functioning, in other words, as Nantucket’s version of the circle of life.

The only people in attendance for my birth were Dr. Menges and two nurses, one of whom was my father’s maiden lady aunt, Edith Holmes, the hospital’s gentle, capable, and cheerful head of nursing. Mothers and best friends did not come rushing over with temple massages and heating pads to provide moral support. And if a midwife had arrived, she would have been treated like a witch doctor and driven into the street.

I’m told that the birth itself—at 7:15pm—was unremarkable, consisting mostly of contractions, cooling compresses, and at the end, a whiff of gas to numb the pain and induce outright unconsciousness. Soon after the deed was done, I was whisked away to the nursery while my mother slowly regained consciousness. She was then walked to a small, three-bed women’s ward on the second floor and wasn’t allowed to see me until the following morning. The umbilical cord was definitely not put in cold storage for future use.

The bill for the delivery—there was no insurance—came to $150.

No one arrived at the hospital the next day with a camera to capture my first gurgles and I escaped the nursery only sporadically for tightly regulated bottle feedings. Even my father was denied a glance of his firstborn until the next day’s visiting hours and not a moment sooner.

My parents named me Gary, although until the last minute, I was going to be Glenn. My mother was looking for a given name that theoretically couldn’t be shortened into a nickname. My uncle had the perfectly respectable birth name of James and she believed a grown man should not have the misfortune of being stuck with a diminutive like “Jimmy” all his life. She switched at the last minute, reasoning there is no cutesy moniker for Gary either. Alas, there is almost no name, no matter how short or monosyllabic, that cannot be made into a nickname, and various friends would later call me “Gare.” My wife takes it a step further, sometimes calling me “Ga” when she’s feeling particularly affectionate. (For what it’s worth, my brother-in-law calls his best friend “Glenny,” so there’s no winning this game.)

Despite being completely healthy, I didn’t leave the hospital for a week—after which I was driven home by my father, cradled in my mother’s arms as she sat in the car’s front seat, completely unprotected by not-yet-invented seat belts or infant car seats. Modern mothers who are familiar with being dumped onto the street after one night in the maternity wing might be interested to know that 1950s best practices required the mother to remain in the hospital for at least seven days to recover from the rigors of labor. In this regard, she was luckier than my grandmother, who, having given birth in the 1930s, was sentenced to two whole weeks of hospital bed rest. She later claimed those were the two most boring weeks of her life.

Naturally, there were no televisions or radios—never mind internet devices—to amuse young mothers as they lay in the women’s ward, but my mother considered herself relatively fortunate because she occupied the bed nearest the window and could look out to West Chester Street to see who was arriving and leaving the hospital.

A few days after I was born, I had company in the nursery. Another young mother had also delivered a baby boy. This small detail never came up until three decades later, when I heard that Nantucket had just recorded its first murder since the Civil War. My mother casually informed me that the perpetrator and I had been born practically at the same time and had even shared space in the nursery. She remembered being in the women’s ward with his mother.

It turned out that my first roommate, a hardened townie, had been in and out of trouble with the law for most of his life. Arrested for receiving stolen property at 17; arrested again for fighting with a police officer at 24. Now, at age 29, he had shot a long-time adversary in the stomach, becoming the protagonist in a case that drew national attention thanks to the mystery novel headlines: “A Murder on Nantucket.” Eventually he was convicted of premeditated murder, had the sentence reduced to manslaughter, and was retried and convicted a second time before being sentenced to 14-20 years in Walpole state prison.

For most people, this story was a curiosity. But what I couldn’t stop thinking about were the vagaries of fate. The two of us slept next to each other right out of the womb and never saw each other again. His family had stayed put on Nantucket with its insular and sometimes grievance-filled culture; mine had moved away, where I’d had all the advantages of an upwardly mobile household. What if the nurses had mixed us up in our bassinets? Would I have turned out to be a murderer? How is it, I wondered, that two babies lying side by side in the same nursery, born to two local working class mothers from similar backgrounds and with similar prospects, could end up in such different places?

Not for the first time, I observed that life is just one roll of the dice after another.