Top 5 Films of 2023

Another year and the Oscars have come and gone! Congratulations to Oppenheimer for winning the big awards including Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor for Robert Downey Jr. and Best Director for Christopher Nolan! Oppenheimer is truly one of the best films of 2023. I’d rank it among my top ten favorite films of that year along with Killers of the Flower Moon (Lily Gladstone is a Best Actress winner in my book), Elemental (Pixar knocks it out of the park with its first rom-com), Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (once again showing how animation shows the best side of the web-slinger) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (the turtles have never looked this great along with its script and music score).

Disney Goes Meta with Chip N' Dale: Rescue Rangers

Someone at Disney saw the trailer for Space Jam 2, and thought "We need to cram more pop culture references, cameos and easter eggs in our upcoming corporate, 90's, nostalgic, meta, live-action/animated hybrid movie with characters that originated around the 1940's and had a resurgence in the 90's with their own show! And to spice it up, include properties that we don't even own! Get every studio on the line! Universal, DreamWorks, Paramount, Warner Bros. every last one of them! They have some favors that they owe us!"

Double Feature: Spiral: From the Book of Saw & The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It.

Other than having the original release date of 2020 and being delayed to the summer of 2021 due to the COVID pandemic, what do Spiral: From the Book of Saw and The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It have in common?  If the answer is both come from horror franchises created by horror master James Wan, then you are right! Spiral is the ninth movie in the Saw series while Conjuring 3 is the eighth film in the Conjuring-verse. Both franchises have been hit-or-miss unless Wan is behind the camera; having directed the first Saw film and the first two Conjuring films with frightening but fantastic results. Can these latest installments manage without Wan’s guidance?

Artemis Fowl: More Foul Than Fair.

Watching Disney's Artemis Fowl reminded me of Percy Jackson and the Olympians:The Lightning Thief, another infamous adaptation based on the first installment of a well-known book series. Neither did a proper job of adapting its source material; heavily changing the main story and leaving out crucial elements from the book. 

Scoob! is a Catastrophic Case too Confounding to Crack

As a kid, I always looked forward to the next case Mystery Inc. had on their hands, whether it be the classic Where Are You? era, accompanied by celebrity guest stars (The New Scooby-Doo Movies), trapping ghosts in a cursed chest (The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo), as children during Scooby's puppy years (A Pup Named Scooby-Doo) or set in a more modern era where Simple Plan sing the best iteration of the Scooby-Doo theme song (What's New Scooby-Doo?). The high point for the franchise came with Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island. The gang had grown-up, the mystery was darker, the monsters were real but the camaraderie between Scooby and the gang was alive and well. It even found time to poke fun at its own formulaic formula. It was everything that the live-action film from 2002 tried to be but failed. The movies that took place in Zombie Island's continuity were more lighter fare but had their own merits from the inclusion of Tim Curry and the Hex Girls in Witch's Ghost, Shaggy and Scooby finding love in Alien Invaders, and a digital encounter with their classic counterparts in Cyber Chase.