It’s the Yesties! An inaugural event to close out a month of Oscar Bait movies with Yesterday’s Movies’ own major awards and not a clever gimmick to cover for a filler week!

Best of January: Ip Man

I didn’t have a theme in January because I had the idea to switch to themes late in the month. Therefore this is the most uneven field of candidates. The only other real competitor was Wings, but the voting body is likely biased toward more modern pacing.

Best Jukebox Musical: Mamma Mia!

This award was won on ABBA’s back. It’s entirely too much fun to be touched by any other movie in the category, but it’s likely also the best at either crafting the plot around the songs or fitting the songs naturally into the plot.

Best Animated: Batman: Mask of the Phantasm

This may seem like a bias toward nostalgia, but the deciding factor here was that this was the only movie I was fully able to follow and didn’t have any more glaringly unfortunate decisions than “of course it’s the Joker again”.

Best Documentary: Man on Wire

This was a charming story and well-paced. I learned a lot in the documentary month but Man on Wire was the best all around entry. Note: F For Fake disqualified for the last act.

Best of the Worst: Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot!

This was a tough decision, since two of the infamously bad selections were quite passable if a bit offbeat and out of the norm. I ultimately chose this one because a grounded 80s comedy looks and feels just a bit better than a 2000s sci-fi with not quite enough budget for — I’m sorry I have to stop this award presentation. I have just been informed that I had already watched and reviewed “Stop!” ten years ago! I honestly did not remember the earlier viewing until I realized I had two different posts available to link with that title. It looks like it fared much better the second time, but I’m afraid due to disqualification, I have to give it to The Adventures of Pluto Nash. Hopefully this is only the second time I’ve reviewed a movie I later realized I’d already watched before without marking it as such.

Worst of the Worst: The Conqueror

Possibly the biggest mistake of a production I’ve ever had the misfortune to sit through for this blog. Enough said.

Best Mockumentary: Bob Roberts

In a category filled with strong but problematic entries that don’t all fully fit the category, I’m a little surprised how chilling a satire came out of a Saturday Night Live skit.

Best Anthology: Twilight Zone: The Movie

None of the anthology selections were all that evenly put together, but that’s what an anthology is for. Twilight Zone had the best overall tone and the highest highs.

Best Overlong Anthology Segment: “Smooth Criminal” from Moonwalker

If you can compartmentalize away everything that has since been learned about the star, “Smooth Criminal” is a fairly interesting children’s adventure fantasy, which goes a long way toward beating a moderately funny beat for beat parody of a single movie that completely destroyed the pacing of the feature.

Best Crutch: The Movies of My Yesterdays series

I enjoy taking a break from trying to gather often slim to nonexistent impressions from a distance into a few coherent paragraphs and instead writing a more introspective introduction, and of course going back to old favorites is always fun.

Best Classic Musical: Paint Your Wagon

I’m just as surprised as everyone else. It should not work. And yet it does. Nobody could have been prepared for this movie in the 60s, but the comedy sticks with you and the music hits some high points and usually avoids overstaying its welcome.

Best… Horror? The Frighteners

I waited entirely too long on this movie because I let a poster scare me away. It’s difficult to judge the month of October because every selection is in a different genre but can be seen as generally Halloweenish. But Frighteners was the one that rewarded my anticipation the most.

Best Duo Movie: Thelma and Louise

I was surprised to discover this isn’t as much a part of Cinemaphile culture as I thought it was, but I suspect that’s down to a mix of recency and not being a story the Movie Bros want to be told.

Best Movie Duo: Romy and Michelle

I can’t award the dark horse movie that belonged to the duo bunch even less than I thought going in, but the title pair have the best relationship of the lot and also the boldest fashion sense.

Best of the Best: Twelve Angry Men

You don’t often see a play that’s been optimized for the screen. You see plenty of plays that are brought to the screen and “opened up” to take advantage of not being locked to a stage, but this is a movie of a play that was written for television, which is a genre that has gone away. It reaches literary highs and does narrative moves with the camera while reaching for the best of literary, stage, and cinematic excellence, though it may not have the best grasp on the law.

Most Overwrought Special Header: The one at the top of this page

I thought I was going to make headers for every theme, but I lose a lot of time to getting an acceptable compromise between my vision and what I can beat my tools into doing for me, so I skipped it for the most part. I think this one took over three hours that I’d intended to spend already writing.