The Projector #70: The Weirdness of January (Patreon)

by Keith Phipps

No, I don’t mean the political weirdness going on. Let’s take a break from that. Let’s stick to movies, and for movies January have traditionally been the weirdest month. Studios tended to put out low-stakes horror movies that will lure anyone wanting a horror fix — see The Grudge (2020) — or movies that were maybe once set to be a bigger deal that studios lost faith in somewhere along the way — see The Turning (2020), also a horror film but one produced in part by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment. But it’s also a time — and I think those of us who write about movies tend to forget about this — when much of the country gets a first chance to see some of the films we see during awards season. And sometimes the period extends into February, as the upcoming releases of Minari and Nomadland attest.

January 2021 is, for obvious reasons, a bit different than most years. But not that different. Today sees the VOD debuts of Promising Young Woman and News of the World, films that were big deals in December (or moderately big deals, anyway) that are just now making their way out into the world in any significant way. News of the World played theaters around Christmas, but does that even count as a release anymore? (Anyway, both are worth checking out and it’s likely one of them will turn up as future episode fodder.)

So maybe it’s comforting that some things haven’t changed that much this year? Honestly, time feels all out of sync these days, which is part of why it makes sense that Tenet, originally scheduled to be one of 2020’s big summer blockbusters, almost feels like a new movie now that it’s available on streaming and physical media. I wrote a bit about this for a piece running in the next couple of weeks, but in some ways Tenet just feels like the biggest example of how viewers will likely end up discovering 2020 movies for years to come. I watched Freaky a couple of weeks ago, for example, and it’s fun. But does it feel like it even came out at all?

One movie that did come out with some fanfare — albeit directly on Disney+ — is Soul, the latest from Pixar and the subject of our most recent episode. We paired it with A Matter of Life and Death and invited Robert Daniels to join us for the episode. (You can find him on Twitter here.)

Just a few article links this week. January can be slow that way.

• For Oscillioscpe’s newly revived Musings (edited by one Scott Tobias), Vikram Murthi writes about why High Fidelity remains so enduring.

• In The Guardian, Charles Bramesco comes to the defense of I Know Who Killed Me. (?!?)

• At Vulture, Alison Willmore writes about the end of Promising Young Woman (it’s definitely a read-after-you-watch piece).

• The premiere of WandaVision inspired Vanity Fair’s Joanna Robinson to ponder the state of superhero TV.

• Also, The Dissolve is no more, but at Letterboxd, friend-of-The Dissolve Kevin White compiles an annual list of what Best Films of the Year list would have looked like if we’d stuck around by tallying up its contributors' best ofs. Here’s the list for 2020. (And here’s where you can follow Kevin on Twitter and Letterboxd).