Beta's Top Ten Favorite Movies of 2023

Today marks fourteen years since my first bog post on Beta is Dead. As has been the custom, I will celebrate by sharing my To Ten Movie list of the past year, in this case 2023.

As usual, take in mind that this is my personal list of favorite movies, not an objective “Top Films of the Year” list, since I didn’t watch every single movie. This is just my personal opinion and, frankly, I’d be interested to hear your favorite movies of the year in the comment section.

Some quick notes about some honorable mentions: I really enjoyed The Marvels and Blue Beetle (especially Blue Beetle) but neither appears on the list because there were just way too many better flicks this year. I still want to make a special note that they were both good and should have done better at the Box Office. Also, Barbie just barely got edged off of the list, and I struggled with this quite a bit. I think it was great, and on any other year it would have made it on here easily. However don’t be surprised if you see the other half of Barbenheimer shortly.

Full Top Ten after the jump.

Review: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is the second sequel to the original film from 2014. It’s based on the 2008 comic book of the same name but not to be confused with the 1969 comic of the same name though it does share some characters.

This movie has been a long time coming, as it should have come out some time ago, striking while the iron from Avengers: Endgame was still hot. The short version as to why it took so long stems from the public firing and re-hiring of writer/director James Gunn. I plan on writing a blog about the DC Comics movie woes and wins very soon and I imagine I’ll go into greater details then, but to keep this blog as short as possible, Gunn was fired when tweets from a decade prior resurfaced of him making many terrible, offensive, and tasteless jokes leading to a backlash from some fans but apparently mostly far-right conservatives and Russian bots (this all happened after months of Gunn publicly shaming then-president Donald Trump, but I’m sure that’s a coincidence). Gunn was then nearly immediately hired by Warner Bros. to direct The Suicide Squad. Around that time Disney, now dealing with a much larger and less bot driven backlash from fans and actors about their knee jerk decision, offered him his job back which he accepted but as he agreed to do Suicide Squad that had to come first. This fiasco directly led to Gunn becoming the one of heads of DC’s film studio, but we’ll talk on that more another day. Add the COVID-19 shutdown into to equation and today’s movie is many years later than it should have been.

[Also note that Gunn also directed a TV/streaming Holiday Special starring the cast which acts as a brief prologue to this move but luckily it’s not that crucial if you want to skip.]

With Gunn already waist deep in building out the next phase of a competing studio, this movie is, and frankly always was going to be, the final GotG film with him in charge and possibly at all, as several actors have mentioned that they plan on this being their final performance. But with all the waiting for this final chapter the question remains: is it any good, or were all the Zack Snyder fans on Twitter correct when they said everything he does is “mid.”

Full review after the jump.

Nerd Rage #17: Beta vs. Marvel Studios

They've come a long way from being a bankrupt joke

A blog in November? What madness is this? As I suggested a while back I have decided not to participate in National Novel Writing Month this year, partly because of all my work with my book earlier this year but main due to having recently started a new job that would not allow the time to writing 50,000 words in a month and still have anything resembling a life (actually my new job doesn’t leave much time for any writing at all, to my great chagrin).

Anyway Marvel Studios formally announced their movie schedule through the year 2019 (and for some reason this is considered a fine move) and apparently it made everyone I know go insane with anticipation. Some of the films sound pretty cool and others one sound kind of “meh”. I thought it would be fun to briefly at all of Marvel’s upcoming flicks and judge mercilessly despite knowing almost nothing about any of them. And hey, maybe you don’t know much about the characters in the film and this may be a nice learning experience.

Of course supposedly a list of Marvel movies was leaked earlier this year and I distinctive recall many people on my Facebook feed losing their shit over it; taking it completely at face value. I recall being very skeptical about it, especially with World Word Hulk, Captain America: The Fallen Son, and Avengers: Civil War as none of them really made any thematic sense to me based on what had already been established. (Though, let’s face it, Marvel could have easily changed key details of their films after the word got out but we either way it’s hard to know of sure) In any case I didn’t even want to talk about those rumors until things were verified. Now that the official list of films have come out I thought I’d go through them (and since I had a few friends who asked my thoughts about it I get it all out of my system at once).

Congratulations, suckers; you f**king fell for it!

So today we’ll look at all of Marvel Studios’ upcoming films. This does not include the upcoming X-Men, Spider-Man or Fantastic Four flicks as they are produced by different studios (Fox and Sony respectively) nor will be looking at DC Comics' line-up partly because they probably deserve their own topic and partly because I don’t want to angrily ramble right now. I mean, I may still do that today but at least this way I’m not starting out already being annoyed and pissed off at the source material. (Doctor Doom is an angry hacker? Really?)

Marvel Studios’ future after the jump.

[WARNING: While most of my ramblings are just conjecture I may be spoiling plot points for future films simply by taking about the comics they're based on. Read at your own risk.]

Review: Guardians of the Galaxy (Film)

I’m sure by now we’re all aware of Marvel Studios' latest offering, Guardians of the Galaxy; judging by the Box Office numbers we’ve all gone to see it at least once. Tagged as Marvel’s riskiest film to date GOTG managed to become one of the year’s biggest hits. I am a little late to the party as my current life situation did not allow me to see this film at a Thursday midnight showing like I would have years ago but I was able to see it after opening weekend and I feel I can properly review it today. However before we get into the movie let’s look back on the comic that inspired it.

First appearing in Marvel Super-Heroes #18 in 1969 the original Guardians of the Galaxy seemed to be Marvel Comics’ answer to DC Comics’ Legion of Super-Heroes, in that both were about a superhero team operating about one thousand years in the future. GOTG was more of a rebel faction fighting against an alien empire rather than a team of super-teens fighting future crime. This incarnation of the team lasted for some time but was never really popular outside its niche audience and never received an abundance of attention outside the hardcore comic book fanbase (which is why you’ve probably never heard of Charlie-27; I sure as hell hadn't).

Cult worthy title or Silver Age silliness?
You decide!

In 2005 Marvel launched a pretty massive crossover event called Annihilation that untied most of their cosmic (i.e. “outer space”) characters in one epic storyline. The comic was extremely well received despite still being more of a cult hit, and ended up getting several sequels and spin-offs over the next few years. One of those spin-offs was a rebooted Guardians of the Galaxy book in 2008. Rather than taking place in the far future this title took place in the Marvel Universe proper, just in space, and was formed by several per-existing cosmic characters: Star-Lord, Gamora, Drax the Destroyer, Rocket Raccoon, Groot, Phyla-Vell (the third Quasar), and rapper Adam WarRock Adam Warlock, who is definitely not a rapper. Though pretty much being exclusively fifth-string characters the team carried on the reputation Marvel had created for itself in recent years for their best storytelling being in the cosmic portion and thus the title garnered a very vocal following.

While the book has been off and on the radar since it's initial launch someone over at Marvel Studios thought it’d be an a awesome idea to make a film version based on the cult title that features characters that no one in the general public had ever heard of. And as the film has made millions and millions of dollars it’s hard to say that wasn’t a brilliant move. This film was directed by James Gunn who also directed the cult films Slither and Super, which makes him an interesting choice to helm this flick. Many people are saying this movie was very good but there are also people who are saying it’s highly overrated. Seeing as I can think of at least one other film that was highly overrated by the internet in recent memory (coughcoughfrozencouch) I think it’s best I examine it myself.

They're like the Avengers...IN SPAAAACE!!

Full review after the jump.

[WARNING: This review contains some spoilers. Nothing too bad, and really nothing that hasn't been floating around already, but they are still there and unmarked. Read at your own risk.]