Hey, where you been?

Mahan’s Media as a blog began with a simple idea: Taking the mini-reviews I was already writing for movies for my own sake, and showing them to… whoever feels like reading what one dude thinks about said movies.

But I like to think that, as my catalogue of write-ups grew, this blog took on a more complex idea: A testing ground for a dream.

A place where I could sharpen my writing skills, continue my self-taught process of learning film criticism and its myriad of different disciplines and perspectives, and turn that into something that might convince someone else that, you know what, this dude knows what he’s talking about. Maybe we should get him writing for us.

And then exactly that happened. Through a collision of random events, I found myself in a position where an editor took a chance with the brain and hands behind all these different reactions and analyses, and decided I should write for them. FilmInk picked me up, and over the past several years, my writing has shown some definite improvement. My perspective on films has gone through several foundational shifts, my ability to convey my feelings and rationalisations has become clearer, and I’ve made connections with people that share this level of intensive fascination and obsession with the medium of film. Some of those connections even began on this humble blog, meaning that what I do here is still having an effect on my work today.

So why haven’t I been posting on here lately?

Top 20 Best Films Of 2023

While 2023 was a turbulent and stressful year for the film industry… it was also a fantastic year for the movies. It built on the momentum from 2022, when blockbusters came back with a vengeance after the lockdowns, and showed a lot of filmmakers going bigger and even taking some genuine risks. Not just delivering big-screen spectacle but actually pushing what certain genres were capable of conveying. What’s more, quite a few filmmakers that I’ve been ragging on for years like Eli Roth, Will Gluck, Guy Ritchie, and Tim Story redeemed themselves with some quality productions this year. Hell, I even got over my problems with David F. Sandberg; regardless of how disastrous that film turned out, this felt like a year where grudges could be forgotten and we were all working towards better days.

It was also a landmark year for yours truly, although if you were going just by what I put up on here, that might require some explanation. FilmInk kept me good and busy through the year, giving me more work than any other year previous, and… honestly, that I got given so many big-name features to look at (quite a few of which will show up on this list) was a solid reassurance that my editor trusted me to get this shit right.

Also, I finally met one of my personal goals and got one of my write-ups up on the review wall at the Dendy Newtown, a cinema I frequent and that tends to have the better selection of all of the cinemas in my ‘area’ (it’s still a bit of a trek from here in the suburbs).

So, as a last hurrah for a pretty damn good year for both myself and the artistic field I’ve dedicated my time to examining, let’s take a gander at my picks for the Top 20 Best Films of 2023. But first…

Top 20 Worst Films Of 2023

2023 was a very turbulent year for the film industry. In an event that I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the basis for its own movie later on down the line, the impeding threat of artificial intelligence on people who actually work to create things led both of the major Hollywood unions, the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild, to jointly go on strike. Deals have since been struck, but between codifying the frankly surreal situation that the industry is in right now post-COVID, and the delays and marketing muffles that resulted from the strikes, it’s a situation that will likely ripple out into 2024 and beyond.

That defining moment goes some way to explain how weird the bad moments of the year had gotten (not saying that media creatives wanting a fair wage and job security is a bad thing, but them being in the position of needing to negotiate for them sure as fuck is). Films with decent and even high expectations fell short, filmmakers try to go big and just wound up embarrassing themselves, and fan-favourite franchises, IPs, and even entire sub-genres hit such a low point that I found myself completely souring on them. Truly, this was a time of sudden, jarring changes.

Compared to last year’s list, there’s also more entries on here that go beyond mere dissatisfaction and right into active irritation and even anger at times, meaning that quite a bit of what’s on here is likely worse than what showed up there. So, let’s join together and flip off the previous year’s trash as it shrinks in the rear view, with a look at my picks for the Top 20 Worst Films of 2023.

Nimona (2023) - Movie Review

Blue Sky Studios deserved better. I had given them a lot of flak for stuff like the Ice Age series and the Rio series, but their last two features not only showed drastic improvement from that standard, but showed that they had carved out their own niche in the modern animation market. Ferdinand had its growing pains, but still had some solid messaging, and Spies In Disguise only built on them further to make something even better. At long last, they found their (in my opinion) much-needed lane for today's family films with some strong pacifist messaging.

Then Disney bought out Blue Sky’s parent company 21^st Century Fox, repeatedly delayed their next feature, and then outright cancelled it along with Blue Sky Studios as a whole. The company that thinks digging up the graves of their previous successes, and that a new coat of CGI paint will cover the smell of stale corpse that is being paraded in front of audiences for profit, is a sound business strategy, but allowing a studio to continue operation and produce media that, just maybe, people might actually want to watch isn’t.

But out of the ashes of Blue Sky, this film still managed to take flight. Picked up by Annapurna Pictures, with animation by DNEG (who proved their salt as a dedicated animation studio with Ron’s Gone Wrong and Entergalactic), and Spies In Disguise directors Nick Bruno and Troy Quane (who were originally slated for the helm before Blue Sky got shuttered) brought back in. That this whole production exists as a manifestation of hubris and spite against the conglomerate that tried to stop it from being made, quite frankly, has already earned my respect. But hoo boy, did it not stop earning it from there.

The Killer (2023) - Movie Review

A new David Fincher film coming out is always cause for celebration. A new David Fincher film coming out after he scored another career highlight with Mank, more so. A new David Fincher film coming out with reuniting with writer Andrew Kevin Walker, the scribe behind his breakthrough work Se7en (and script doctor on his other crowning work Fight Club), even more so than that. Sure, I can’t say I was expecting this to entirely reach those same heights, but as someone who holds both creatives in such high esteem, I was definitely curious to see what a new team-up between them would look like. And in a lot of ways, it’s business as usual for the both of them, and in just as many, there’s something different going on here.

El Conde (2023) - Movie Review

Time to add a new dot on this blog’s global cinematic coverage with a look at some Chilean cinema… although this isn’t necessarily all that new for this blog, or indeed for just the stuff I’ve seen outside of it. We’ve looked at director Pablo Larraín’s work on here twice before with the historical biopics Jackie and Spencer, and there’s some ‘6 Degrees To Kevin Bacon’ that can be played connecting this to the only other Chilean film I’ve seen in The Wolf House, an animated horror story set in the Colonia Dignidad, whose overlord, Paul Schäfer, has been publicly defended by conservative minister Hernán Larraín, Pablo’s father.

They Cloned Tyrone (2023) - Movie Review

After co-writing Creed II, and getting thrown into the unholy soup that is the script for Space Jam: A New Legacy, writer Juel Taylor has made his directorial debut with one of the better Blaxploitation flips I’ve seen in a minute. Where remakes of the old guard like Shaft and Superfly felt the need to modernise the genre’s aesthetics (which only brought into question why they’d even bother getting involved in that genre in the first place), this actually sticks to its identifiable qualities, albeit with some updating on the cultural references like Obama and Bitcoin. The moody, shadowy cinematography from DP Ken Seng, the Terrace Martin-esque funk soundtrack from Desmond Murray and Pierre Charles (those basslines are just *chef’s kiss*), the frankly amazing costume design across the board; this looks really damn good.