Welcome to the Weekly Movie Thread, your place on the Avocado to discuss films with your fellow commenters. Want to make a recommendation? Looking for recommendations? Want to share your opinions of movies, both new and classic?

Happy Boxing Day and/or Second Day of Christmas to our Avocados out there. This is typically a time of reflection over the year. I put together the Best of… movie lists, I typically put out a prompt about the best film you saw this year, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Pretty easy gig, huh?

Little did I have an idea of what was coming up in the next few years. A pandemic. Movies released directly to streaming. Delays. Bong Joon-ho and Chloe Zhao winning Best Picture Oscars. This is about five years of the most chaotic time I have ever seen in film.

Hence, permit me a moment of self-reflection. I started doing the Weekly Movie Thread regularly at the beginning of 2019. (I’d done one a few months earlier in 2018 as a fill-in.) I had been doing foreign movie reviews, but in a way I felt it was more important there was a regular space to talk about movies in-depth. So I kept on doing this even when I stopped doing regular reviews. Going in, you think you have an idea of how movie culture works.

I bring this up because, when 2023 started, everyone expected this year to be the ones where things returned to normal… and as it turned out, it was anything but. Surefire blockbuster franchises failing left and right. The biggest movie (and cultural event) of the year being about a popular doll. Movies being pushed to a future date because of a historic strike that united both writers and actors. Marvel’s VFX workers unionizing.

At its core, I believe, is a simmering resentment everywhere. Mainly the sense that people more powerful than you just see you as insignificant and disposable. We saw it in the strikes where people get paid little money under the current streaming contracts and the higher-ups salivating at the prospect of replacing them with computers. But that’s not all! We also see it with audiences, who realize that movie execs think we are so dumb that all they need to do is feed data into an algorithm and we’ll gobble up whatever soulless result the computer spits out.

That’s what all this comes down to: everyone suddenly realized these rich assholes hate us, but they will gladly take away out money… whether it’s through cheap labor ot box office returns. Which leads to the most amazing thing that happened this year: the writers and actors strike actually inspired people everywhere to go on strike on their own… and win. That’s … something I would never have predicted would have happened. Not in a hundred years. For once it wasn’t a film that inspired. It was dedicated people who work on these movies that inspired.

Anyway, I felt I had to get this off my chest before 2023 ended. I didn’t think anything would surprise me more than the movie landscape in 2020, but wow… 2023, you shocked me.

Today’s bonus prompt: what movie (not necessarily one released this year) was the best film you saw in 2023?