2024 Year in Review – The ‘Jitsu Awards
Tonight on Filmjitsu, Mike and I are winding back the clock on another year of cinematic calamity and mining for… anything… that might have made the pasy twelve months of mostly watching garbage seem worthwhile. That’s right, it’s time for our second Annual Year-end Awards show, the Jitsus!
As I said, the point of this show isn’t to spend all of our time wading through the usual bad writing, terrible performances, trash cinematography, distracting music and abhorrent, even non-existent direction but rather to find those little slivers of hope buried in the dark brutality of our ongoing war; a war where there are no victors, but instead just two losers and a whole lot of spilled popcorn.
The ‘Jitsus are a kind of cease fire between us, Mike, awards given during a time of year when we let the smoke clear and see if there’s anything at all we learned that was positive from our exploits in bottom-of-the-barrel cinema. And you know what? It wasn’t all that bad!
Sure, there was Glen or Glenda, and Bratz. There was The Avengers and, oh god, The Disappointments Room. And yes, the was “The Fanatic,” “Jaws: The Revenge,” “From Justin to Kelly” and a whole-ass trilogy of Halloween movies that shit all over the legacy of Michael Myers.
Ok, then maybe it was all that bad. Christ, what are we doing with our lives?!
Oh yeah, right: we’re celebrating. It’s time to find the polish on all these turds: performances, direction, music, stunts and other whatnot that made some of the awful a little less awful. Can we manage to find winners in each of our 9 categories and then, somehow, through a game of kick three, pick one, choose a best picture from the main reviews of our last 25 episodes?
Well, we better! Because it’s almost time to begin.
But first, since this is Filmjitsu, we of course will have a bottom five, and before we announce our best picture selections we’ll be listing the five worst movies each of us watched during the past year. But to end the show on a more positive note, before we wave goodbye to the flaming dumpster fire that was 2024, we’re going to offer up a couple “Best of the Year” staff picks before Mike hits me where it hurts most and gives me my first punishment of 2025. So… without further ado… let’s begin the 2024 Jitsu Awards!
Categories:
Best Stunt (the sweaty Eddies) – 100% goes to the guy who did the fall in Ballistic: Els vs. Sever. I talked about it in my main review and we’ll link the scene in the show notes, but holy hell – the stunt is one for the ages as a dude is shot off the roof of a building and then falls backward several floors onto the hood of a car that crumples, shattering all windows, upon impact. This would be a great stunt shot by any angle, but to get it from directly in front of the stunt man as he falls, the camera essentially falling with him? Madness and forever a great stunt memory for me.
Best Actor – Rory Kinnear, I guess for just sheer versatility. Could there really be anyone else in the running? Possibly could be Glen Powell for Twisters, but really, all he had to do was stand around. Who else?! I mean, when Ed Wood from Glen or Glenda is one of the potential nominees, or Justin Guarini from From Justin to Kelly? Um. Maybe Tom Selleck in Runaway? Or Gene Simmons? Not going to be anyone from Jaws 4, Eks vs. Sever or Gunpowder Milkshske.
Best Actress – the obvious choice is Jessie Buckley as Harper in Men, which is pretty much the only “good” movie we saw this year for the show. Sure, Twisters and Red One were entertaining, but Men was appointment cinema from one of the most compelling writer/directors working today. All that said, Men is a bit of a slog to get through despite its performances, so I’m embracing the patriarchy and instead giving the award to Julia Roberts for Pretty Woman for a Star-making turn that made her a superstar. Another possible runner up? Meryl Streep for Mamma Mia. She was incredibly good – bright, funny, contagiously giddy – but all of that and more were present in Robert’s as Vivianne.
Best Love Scene – I cannot give this to The Room. I just can’t. The love scene between writer-director-producer-star Tommy Wiseau and co-star Juliette Danielle is probably the ultimate example of what not to do with a sex scene. So, in its place I honestly thought I had to go with either the itsy bit of nookie between Kong and Jessica Lange’s Dwan or, because it’s an actual sex scene, the moment in ThanksKilling when Turkie takes over pumping Natasha Cordova’s Ali from behind. But, wisely, I’m leaving bestiality behind and instead going with the hotel piano scene in Pretty Woman, because I’m pretty sure it’s the only other actual love scene in any of the movies we watched, even if it was paid for.
Best Death Scene – Runaway (Gene Simmons) Pure cheese, but it was so fun seeing this villain die and at the “hands” of his own spider bots after a short bad guy fall. Dumb, but so good.
Best Score – King Kong (John Barry) John Guillerman and Dino Delaurentiis did right in choosing one of the all-time great film composers to handle the giant ape’s return to the big screen. As epic as many of the scenes require, Barry’s time spent scoring 007 movies seems to have paid off huge. There’s a lot wrong with King Kong, but there’s also a lot done right and Barry’s rolling, sweeping orchestral flourishes are firmly in the “right” column. That said, it bareky beats out the Jaws: The Revenge score by Michael Small which was great but loses points for leaning to heavily on John Williams melodies from the original film.
Best Cinematography – It’s tough not to just hand this one over to Alex Garland’s frequent collaborator Rob Hardy for Men, because it looks fucking amazing with all of its softly focused background creating isolating shots of Buckley’s Harper. With Mission Impossible: Fallout as well as all of Alex Garland’s other films, such as Annhilation and Ex-Machina, this guy should operate on a whole other level above just about every other DP we saw work from. Yet this year we also saw King Kong’s Richard H. Kline, who did Star Trek the Motion Picture and Body Heat and the DP from 9-Lives, Karl Walter Lindenlaub who did Independence Day and Stargate amongst many other things. In fact, this field was crowded by pros, most notably Runaway’s John A. Alonzo, who won an Oscar for shooting Chinatown and The Avengers’s Roger Pratt, who was Terry Gilliam’s DP from Brazil through 12 Monkeys but is probably best known for doing Tim Burton’s Batman! Such a crowded field this year!
But one guy deserves this award over everyone else, and that’s Dan Mindel who not only shot Red One, which is honestly a surpringly cool-looking movie, but is also responsible for the cinematography of the only other film we saw in theaters this year: Twisters! The fact this guy was the director of Photography on two movies in 2024 that both exceeded our expectations and part of the reason for that happening was the shooting? Yeah, this guy earned it. Also, this guy’s resume is bonkers and includes Mission Impossible 3 and the kelvin timeline Star Trek as well as The Force Awakens, all directed by JJ Abrams. Oh, he also did The Amazing Spiderman 2, with your favorite, Jamie Foxx’s Electro!
Peebles’s Choice Award – Worst Accent: It has to go to whatever the Hell is going on with Tommy Wiseau in “The Room.” But since that isn’t really acting and it’s just Wiseau’s way of speaking in English, the true winner is Chris Evans in “Red One” for his abysmally bad New York tough-guy accent. It’s grating and awfully fake sounding. And if not his, then maybe the New York accent that’s inexplicably employed by actress Joanne Baron as part of Corey’s mom’s character.
Best Director – Alex Garland for “Men.” The only “real” movie we got to watch for the show. I think it was either going to be him of Guillerman for “King Kong,” because you have got to give it to the veteran director of films such as 1974’s The Towering Inferno and 1966’s The Blue Max for making a sweeping epic worthy of King Kong’s stature. Also, as a close runner-up, Gary Marshall for “Pretty Woman” which was a really well directed romantic comedy. Also, as a big runner-up, the absolutely insane first-person directorial debut by Ilya Naishuller. Bold, insane and exhausting as the movie is, it’s nothing if not an incredibly unique artistic statement. That said, it’s not quite “directed” in a purely cinematic way and it’s almost not even a movie, so I have to give it to Garland.
Best Picture Options:
King Kong
Runaway
The Room
Mama Mia!
Mike:
King
The Fanatic
Runaway
Halloween Ends
Bottom Five Movies Watched in 2024
Kung Fu Panda 4
dir. Mike Mitchell, Stephanie Stine
Mitchell. Whoa. Before seguing into a career of CG animated fare, he did Deuce Bigelow: Male Gigolo and Surviving Christmas, which I kind of like. Once into CG, he did Shrek Forever After, Lego Movie 2 and Alivin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked. Stine’s career as director seems to be just starting, but she was in the Art Department for a number of TV series and movies, including Raya the Last Dragon. Panda 4 is her feature directorial debut, perhaps a passing of the baton if the baton were a soulless money grab for all involved. Unlike the other three Kung Fu Panda movies, everyone involved seems bored, the voice acting from Black and Akwafina sounding like what you’d expect at a table read.
Madame Web
dir. S.J. Clarkson
Holy Hell, this was exactly the shitshow everyone was saying. I don’t want to go too deep into the many, many problems with the film – which include the performances, the screenplay, the direction, the editing and the not-so-special effects – because there’s a really good chance this will be an episode one of these days. And as an example as to why, I’ll just play this single clip of terribly-acted, horribly-written dialog:
Julia Carpenter: [checks a photo of a man] So, who is he?
Cassandra Webb: That man is Ezekiel Sims, he was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died.
Director S.J. Clarkson has a long career of single-episode television directing credits on her resume on some pretty huge shows, such as House, Succession and Orange is the New Black, but this was her feature directing debut and, egad, she’s got to be wishing she took on an episode of literally anything – Fuller House, Fear the Walking Dead, fucking Henry Danger – because yikes, this is not how you want to make your start in the Marvel Universe, directing what is – apparently – tied as the second lowest-rated Marvel movie ever on Rotten Tomatoes. At a fresh rating of only 11%, Madame Web beats only 2015’s Fantastic Four and ties Jennifer Garner’s solo “Elektra” movie. Oy.
Spaceman
dir. Johan Renck
With Adam Sandler beginning to show signs of a reinvigorated dramatic acting career thanks to the tense, shocking “Uncut Gems” and the feel-good “Hustle” which he sandwiched in between garbage like the “Murder Mystery” movies. But this year, he stretched into my favorite genre, humanist sci-fi, and the result was this nigh-unwatchable mess that’s equal parts boring and unsettling since his co-star is a 6-foot space tarantula voiced by Paul Dano. This is stretching to tell a human story about an astronaut on an impossibly lonely mission to the outer reaches of our solar system and the challenges at home he’s left behind and now must face while “floating in a tin can.” Mike, you’d rather orally service our incoming President than watch frame one of this nightmare and I know this because I don’t even have a problem with Spiders, but I could barely tolerate watching this giant one float around in zero G’s. There are so many odd directorial decisions made here – like casting Sandler as a heavily-accented Eastern European named Jakub or casting Isabella Rosellini as an aging space agency commander, and never really explaining the existence of Hanush – yes, the spider is named Hanush – or whether it is even real or not. I understand this was not exactly a sci-fi film in conventional terms, and I’m fine with that as movies like Arrival, Interstellar, Contact and The Abyss – to name several of my favorites – all are more concerned with their characters than the sci-fi happenings. But Jesus, this could have been a single-room movie with a therapist on Earth instead of this wackadoodle nonsense.
Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
dir. Samuel Bayer
I’d never been all that interested in seeing this one, but in the interest of perhaps having a bitter disagreement with you about the merits of this remake – because apparently my half-hearted justification for the existance of Gus Van Zant’s “Psycho” wasn’t enough to have my movie-lover card revoked – I decided to finally watch the 2010 remake of the Wes Craven classic and you know what? It’s a steaming pile of shit. It’s both overlong and uninvolving, the scares are largely telegraphed, and then there’s the matter of Jackie Earle Haley who completely misses the mark as Freddy, either through his own decisions as an actor to play the character as weirdly sympathetic-yet-threatening or due to the absolutely horrendous make-up effects which make Freddy look less frightening and more… like an actual misshapen burn victim. Or an alien of some kind. I couldn’t decide. DIrector Samuel Bayer is largely a music video director for acts as varied as Green Day, Garbage and My Chemical Roman, and this Elm Street reboot was his one and done as a Feature director. I can see why, as his visual style in no way meshes with the vibe of Elm Street and Freddy. So, Mike, you were right and I was a total idiot for even thinking this might be worth watching. It wasn’t. At all. Not even for the sake of argument.
Blood Beach
dir. Jeffrey Bloom
We spent an entire episode discussing this cinematic shart, and it holds the title as not only the worst movie I watched for FIlmjitsu during 2024, but it’s among the very worst movies I’ve ever seen. Whether it’s the positively awful production values, the confusing screenplay that cannot decide if it’s a slasher more or an inept police procedural or the fact that whatever is doing the killing on the beach is as inconsistent a killer as could be. The shooting, sound, acting… everything about this makes it a slog to endure and if there’s ever been a film wielded as a deadly weapon, it was this one. Seriously, if anyone needs to know more about this calamity, revisit Episode 30 and have a listen. I promise it’s more entertaining by a factor of 1 million than the movie itself and you can listen to Mike’s rant about hating the beach, which if we were to do a top 5 best moments of Filmjitsu for 2024, would definitely be in the top 3.