35. Everybody Wants To Love You – Japanese Breakfast

Michelle Zauner, former frontwoman for Philly lo-fi punk rockers Little Big League, moved back home to Oregon to be with her Korean mother as she slowly succumbed to cancer. After she passed, Zauner spent time shining up her formerly raw releases into shinier pop tunes, and released them under the name Japanese Breakfast. 

The album's a thousand different expressions of the things zipping through Zauner's head, and "Everybody Wants To Love You" launches in with a raw strum of electric guitar and distant firecrackers before exploding into dreamy keyboards and ethereal vocals, a punchy soft-punk anthem about seduction and marriage that floors its way through verses and choruses and a guitar solo before crashing to a finish two minutes and twelve seconds in. Zauner is capable of accomplishing a hell of a lot in not a lot of time.

Where I Found It: Andy Greenwald's Best of 2016 List

This is the movie I kept encouraging people to go out and see. Not because it's good, because it is decidedly not good. It is impressively not good. It is in fact so bad it seems like at several points decisions were made with the specific intention of being terrible. And that's what makes it so fascinating.

It seemed so fun on paper: Matt Damon, back playing the titular hero again after a nine-year layoff, Paul Greengrass again behind the camera, and after such a long break, surely a new world of stories to tell. Plus, throwing in pros like Tommy Lee Jones and Alicia Vikander as new agents to hunt down Bourne seemed exactly the sort of shot-in-the-arm a rebooting franchise wants (when you're doing a movie about tracking someone down, getting the guy who tracked down Harrison Ford in The Fugitive seems the absolute best choice). But, as we keep finding out from these Netflix reunions: sometimes the idea of getting the whole band back together is a lot more fun than the execution.

Ugh.

This is an inane complaint, but I don't like doing year-end movie lists at the actual end of the year.

You know, the only time that makes sense to do them.

I read heaps of official year-end lists for major publications, and they've already had the chance to see all the awards-bait movies, some of which are definites to be added to this list.* I'll have seen the rest of the 2016 nominees by the time we get to the Oscars, but it feels wrong to add Brooklyn or Bridge of Spies to this list just because I watched them this year, when they've already been feted at last year's Oscar ceremony.

*This list includes literally every theatrical release I saw this year, so I guess it would actually be impossible for them not to.

But, by the same notion, the odds that Damien Chazelle's La La Land ends up being one of my top-5 movies of the year seems extremely high, yet it won't be mentioned here, and if I find Martin Scorsese's Silence a complete boor (possible!), will I have no outlet for my complaints?*

*Since Silence is a film about Jesuit priests who have taken a vow of silence, this actually does seem appropriate.