The Best Movies from the Worst Year

Let's face it. 2020 was a burning garbage scow of a year that produced a sweltering combination of sickness, death, misery, political mayhem, controversy, stupidity, and pain. While that's a pretty good description of any year in Hollywood, it was a great description of this year, as the industry worked around pandemic restrictions to produce a crop of films that was as wildly uneven as a dinner table fashioned by a carpenter on LSD.

So, without further ado (no, not Freddy Adu), here are the Academy's eight choices for Best Picture of 2020.

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The Father

Anthony Hopkins plays an aging father struggling with his failing memory. Things look grim for him until one day his caretaker daughter accidentally drops a Ming vase on his head, and in the tradition of great narratives like I Dream of Jeannie and Batman, the bonk on his noggin causes him to regain his complete memory. 

He realizes he is in actuality the infamous cannibal mass murderer Hannibal Lecter, and that his "daughter" is really FBI agent Clarice Starling, keeping tabs on him so he doesn't turn the nursing home ward into a barbeque joint.

This commences a grand battle of wits, as Lecter plots and carries out dozens of escape attempts, all foiled by the equally resourceful Clarice, or by him having to suddenly go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, or by urgent foot cramps, or he gets winded and needs to sit down for a few hours, or Wheel of Fortune is on, and who wants to miss that?

His most daring escape attempt occurs when he hires a plane (a Vought Corsair F4U-5, natch) by phone to fly past the nursing home at night. He manages to get to the top floor of the building (elevator, natch) and leaps from the building, missing the plane by several dozen yards, because planes can't fly very close to buildings.

He plummets helplessly to the ground, but just at the point of impact he awakens to discover that, in the tradition of great narratives like Dallas and Newhart, it is all just a dream, and he is still in the nursing home, his memory still foggy, and his daughter suddenly trying to convince him of the joys of vegetarianism.

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Judas and the Black Messiah

The story of a famous incident during the filming of Tim Rice's and Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ, Superstar, when Carl Anderson, the African-American actor who played Judas, and Ted Neeley, the Caucasian actor who played Jesus, switched places one day on the set, to see if director Norman Jewison would notice. 

Jewison does notice, but pretends not to, because he wants to make the actors think they had pulled one over on him. Also, it's the '70's and he is as high as a weather balloon. Seventeen scenes later, the actors tell him about the prank, but Jewison, impressed with the way they had handled each other's roles, and also unable to feel his nose on his face, has decided to completely revise the film, changing the title to Judas and the Black Jesus. Someone suggests the title Judas and the Black Messiah has a better, less alliterative ring to it, and Jewison replies, "Sure, what the hell! Pass me that doobie."

Soon though, Webber and Rice find out about the dramatic change to their magnum opus (well, at least until Cats, right?) and they hustle over to the Colonies from Old Blighty, travelling all night by Vought Corsair. By this time, Jewison has completely converted the production into a reboot of Ben Hur, with Neeley as Ben, Anderson as Hur, and Charles Nelson Reilly as Masala (inventor of the sauce).

Webber demands that Jewison be stopped, and Rice concurs, saying, "Yeah, I guess." The production is halted and re-retooled back into the original production, all at a cost of only 85 million dollars ($195,000,000 in 2021 dollars, half of which was the cost of knocking down the chariot racing arena.) Amazingly, the cast and crew complete the picture on time, and the rest is revisionist Hollywood history.

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Mank

The story of the making of the writing of the screenplay of the film of Citizen Kane (more or less). Herman J. Mankiewicz - known to his friends as "Mank," because he hails from Manchester, England and drinks like it - is an experienced Hollywood screenwriter looking for new challenges. Wonder boy genius Orson Welles persuades Mank to co-write a film about William Randolph Hearst, and hoo boy, this is where the trouble begins.

Mank's first draft is rejected by Welles as being too much like a Western.

"I know I tell the press I watched Stagecoach 40 times to prepare for this, but I wasn't planning on remaking it," Orson's drolly replies, eliciting a lugubrious titter from Mank and a dramatic swoon from Louella Parsons. 

They quickly work out that Mank had mistakenly thought the film was to be about Western actor William Randolph Hearst Scott, more famously known as Randolph Scott. Further versions mistakenly reference western star William S. Hart, William the Conqueror, Randolph Churchill, and (especially strange, given that neither were famous yet) Body Heat star William Hurt, and Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer (full birth name William Rudolph Hearst).

Finally, Mank writes a treatment that actually centers around William Randolph Hearst, ending with Hearst flying his private Vought Corsair F4U-1P (the one with the gold trimmed R-2800-8W Double Wasp engine and a miniature wine cabinet) into the Hollywood sign. Welles considers everything in the script to be perfect, but cuts the ending (due to the cost of blowing up the Hollywood sign). This sends Mank into a spiral, not unlike the F4U-1P with its tail rudder out of alignment.

The film is (of course) a masterpiece, but the experience leaves both men forever distant from one another, and RKO with a gigantic fireplace set eventually used in looped YouTube holiday videos.

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Minari

Minari is the gentle and touching (the dad is a chiropractor) story of a Korean family who move to Arkansas, in the United States to start a new life. 

Unfortunately, Hollywood executives, starved for profits due to the pandemic, decide that the story is far too gentle and touching and needs to be spiced up by turning it into a touching and extremely violent kaiju film.

The Yi family are struggling to make their way as farmers in 1980's rural Arkansas (get in line!). The Minari water celery the family is growing on their farm, is just about ready for harvest when a freak accident at Arkansas One, the only nuclear reactor in the state, causes a cloud of radioactive steam to be released. The steam menacingly floats across the state, making a beeline for the farm like a Ko Jin-young approach shot at an easy pin.

The steam causes the celery to mutate into a gigantic green monster that resembles a pale Godzilla with a leafy hairdo. The creature quickly heads for the state capitol, squashing numerous state troopers, chicken farms, and Walmart Neighborhood markets on the way (and that is how you do product placement, people!)

The beast - well, technically the veggie - proves invulnerable to attack. Bombs, missiles, flamethrowers, even the machine gun fire of 10,000 Vought Corsairs, proves useless until the fateful moment when the giant, mutated Minari steps into a rabbit farm and is devoured within 60 seconds. The state is saved.

Unfortunately, the radioactive celery causes the rabbits to mutate, and - you guessed it - Minari turns out to be the prequel for Night of the Lepus.

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Nomadland

This documentary details the origins of Disney's least beloved section of Disneyland. During a particularly successful period in Disney's history, a giddy and reckless Uncle Walt decides to dip into his vault (which interestingly looks exactly like Scrooge McDuck's vault) and build a new section of Disneyland based on the long forgotten Disney live-action film Drunken Hobos of the Union Pacific Line, starring Ken Berry, Sandy Duncan, Tim Conway, and Foster Brooks (especially Foster Brooks).

Despite desperate pleas from his brother Roy and a distraught Annette Funicello, who had a bit part in the film, Walt signs off on the project. He approves a long train ride where passengers are accosted by tramps asking for  bottles of Everclear. His Nomadland vision also includes a cracked tea cup ride, a merry-go-round made up entirely of mangy train yard dogs, and a ride where visitors soar above Nomadland in Vought Corsairs, dropping knapsacks of beef jerky and tins of Van de Kamp's beans on a sea of Disney cast members dressed as Foster Brooks's beloved character from the film, "Ol' Smelly Joe." Numerous skull injuries ensue.

Eventually, Walt realizes that the complete and utter shabbiness of the venue, not to mention the stench, is ruining the park for the rest of the visitors. He shuts the entire project down, until it is repurposed decades later as California Adventure.

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Promising Young Woman

A disturbing psychological tale of a young woman who compulsively makes promises to everyone she knows. 

It starts with her parents, to whom she promises she will become a lawyer. Unfortunately, she flunks out of law school after defining the legal term "Nolo contendere" as "Marlon Brando's famous line from On the Waterfront." She next disappoints her best friend by promising to be her maid of honor, even though she has already been married four times by this point (twice to Tom Green). After then promising to be her matron of honor, she misses the wedding when she oversleeps after a marathon overnight session of annoying people on Twitter. (To be fair, that could happen to anyone.)

With no career prospects and having alienated her family and friends, she hits the road, taking odd jobs (they all involve prime numbers). Even this desperate trajectory is impeded by her obsessive failure to keep promises. She promises to be a wing walker for a flying circus but gets on the wrong plane (a Vought Corsair AU-1) and is nearly decapitated when it flies through a barn. She promises to drive a Lamborghini cross country, but runs out of gas while doing donuts in the parking lot. She promises to be a prom date for a gawky, underconfident young man who thought she looked cool doing the donuts in the Lamborghini, but she nervously backs out when she finds out the prom theme is "Flying Thru The Barn."

At her wits end, she accidentally foils a convenience store robbery by killing the robbers with their own Uzis. As the ambulance wheels the bullet-ridden corpses of the criminals away, she has a sudden epiphany that this is her gift in life: to make all the bad people pay. So, she becomes The Equalizer.

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Sound of Metal

This grating documentary is a 12 hour compendium of the seemingly infinite (especially around hour seven) sounds that different types of metal can make when grinded together.

The documentary is structured in chronological order throughout history, starting in the early Bronze age, where primitive craftsmen attempt to fashion medals for future Olympic games. Much of this section is made up of bronze on bronze sounds, until civilization discovers there are other metals that can make your eardrums vibrate like an overloaded washing machine.

Soon (well, hour four), we are listening to the sounds of armor and weaponry clashing, the collision of building materials, a Vought Corsair colliding with an enraged MechaGodzilla, and a wrecking ball putting some very serious dents in a 1953 Rolls Royce Phantom IV. Also, there is a fascinating seventeen minute sequence where someone slowly files through a steel drum while simultaneously playing it.

The director mines as much of this as he can, and when the film is over, and you have woken up, you will be glad it is over.

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The Trial of the Chicago 7

Directed by wacky West Wing impresario Aaron Sorkin, this taut drama seems very confusing until you realize that the title has a typo in it. The actual title is The Trail of the Chicago 7. The film is a western about seven tenderfoot businessmen (they all have bunions) from Chicago, who decide to leave behind their cushy, late 19th century gigs as merchant bankers and become lion-tamers. No! No, sorry. They form an adventurous gang of bank robbers in the wild, wild West (Peoria). 

Soon, they conclude that they need to move even farther west (Peoria's a tough town, after all) and make subsequent stops in Davenport, Iowa City, Des Moines, and strangely, Charlottetown, P.E.I. (where they are thrashed within an inch of their lives in a vicious barroom fight by a plucky, young red-headed woman). Eventually, they wind up in Flagstaff, Arizona. 

The film is full of weird anachronisms. For example, all of the gang members wear Beats headphones and Air Jordans. When sentenced to hang for knocking over a Rainforest Grill, they appeal for clemency to President Josiah Bartlet. And, in one of the most action-packed scenes, they attempt a horseback robbery of a Vought Corsair F4U while it is in flight over Guadalcanal. (Even I must admit, watching the horses leap from wing to wing was thrilling.)

Finally, they realize that their foggy dreams of becoming infamous, wanted desperados are nothing more than the infantile projections of a mid-life crisis, and they return home to form a garage band named after their hometown.

1. There are no footnotes this year.