Depression is when Catherine Keener leaves you, like in Hamlet 2
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I first saw SNY when it came out and I was in young and in college and hadnât experienced real loss or real life at all. I thought it was really depressing
I watched it recently, after 16 years of life (losing my parents, etc), and I thought it was hilarious
funny how that worked
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Saw Sonic 3. The sonic movies are all really good, they are for kids but donât get cloying, have good action sequences, are very funny, etc. Manages to have some deeper cuts you wouldnât expect from a Hollywood film. Jim Carrey is still really good. Itâs weird to have a series of videogame films, about Sonic even, that stay true to the characters and setting while still being a Hollywood film and still be entertaining. Thereâs even a very tiny Clerks reference in the movie when a character plays rollerblade hockey on a roof. (Is this a reference or a thing people just do?)
BEFORE the movie there was a trailer for a movie about a child with autism, and it was from the producers of a movie with the word âJesusâ in it, and around this time I shut my eyes so I couldnât take any more of it in. Not looking into it more.
Also this was a good followup to Synecdoche NY because whooo that was a depressing movie
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I was absolutely dying at that trailer for the Christian movie about the quirked up autistic kid who solves everyoneâs emotional problems using his whimsical bluntness.
Yeah Iâve seen the trailer too and because of the Jesus element I kept expecting it to become one of those return from death narratives, like the autistic kid meets god
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william shatner directed a movie in 2002 where a woman gets lupus so she makes her boyfriend take her to groom lake to see if they can see an alien. this is all very boring and the audio is mixed horribly so you can barely hear the dialogue half the time until they wreck their car (also they have sex immediately after the car wreck like Crash??) and he wanders onto a military base like mulder, leaving the gf behind, who promptly gets gang raped by a bunch of cowboys, this happens with such bewildering speed that the scene is over before you can even process why the fuck this is happening, and then it cuts to william shatner dressed like a tokusatsu guy coming out of a tube
they never really acknowledge what happened again outside of a guy saying that the aliens got her because they are stealing his livestockâs pussies (this is literally what he says) so like what the fuck??? WHY DID THAT NEED TO HAPPEN MR SHATNER
the last like 30 minutes of the movie are them running around the set of Space Mutiny
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Was reading Roger Ebertâs writing about Synecdoche NY and he thought the set was inspired by the Jerry Lewis movie âLadies Manâ, which has a huge 3 story stage that contains multiple open rooms. so I watched the trailer for âLadies Manâ and this was my first actual exposure to Jerry Lewis.
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marnie - tippi hedren is great in it, hearing more abt her career made this one seem even sleazier and more unstable, like a stock psychological obsession plot too warped by off-camera creepy obsessiveness to fully cohere or make sense in its own terms. even despite the obligatory(?) ending where the characters explain the psychological meaning of everything you saw in dogged detail psycho style. weird psychedelic lightning effects.
dark city - feels like the friend with the worst aesthetic taste you know got to make a movie on kickstarter money (positive), which makes it even funnier that videogames ripped it off so much⌠like its basically bioshock right down to the realisation that when characters talk about altering reality by force of will they mean knocking each other around with invisible beams. there wasnt a part where he shoots lightning into a puddle to electrocute a group of mob enemies though so credit where its due. the shots of buildings popping up like mushrooms were genuinely quite cool.
forbidden world - LOVED the noodly synth noises that turned out to be a guy playing futuristic Space Saxophone diegetically in his room. i wish after killing the lady who typed âcan we co exist?â to the alien on the computer the alien had used its spike tentacle to type back NO. the lady scientist costumes with the sparkly high heels were pretty funny esp the one whi had the pink jumpsuit. bioengineering lab gidget division.
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Had an interesting movies experience on my first business trip since 2000-late and having a hotel room to myself for the first time in a rather long time. I was in Baton Rouge for the first time and gave myself up to the Whatever Is On Showtime Faeries what lived at the hotel. On the first night I saw a little ofâŚ
Blade Runner 2049 (2017):
Bad sound mix which, I seem to remember, was the style at the time. I turned on subs to try to catch up but it really did not help with that. Still, cool art design, and unoffensive to look at before wandering the dimly lit suburban area my colleague had deemed best to stay in, searching for a decent meal. It was strange to turn off the TV knowing that I would probably never return to this film. It would not be waiting when I returned. I felt mastered by time once again and would have reveled in the feeling longer had I not been so hungry.
I was tempted to walk through the very dark stripmall parking lot non-pathways to a place called Movie Tavern where I could have watched Werewolves (2024) while eating a Mr. Beast Burger, but no. The Faeries of The Unpausable Showtime Channels had ownership of my eyes for the course of this stay, and the only Mr. Anything who ever will feed me fast food is Mr. Beef and Pizza. Instead I visited the very lovely and unpretentious Greek & Lebanese restaurant called Albasha where they offer really delicious plates of food. Satisfied and exhausted from a day of travel and work, I returned to catch what felt like the second half of the highlight of the tripâŚ
Burn After Reading (2008):
I loved the Coen Brothers growing up. Raising Arizona got played on WGN once in a while over rainy weekends and the repetition pounded something important into my seven years old brain. Iâd seen bits and pieces before but one time I caught it from the slapstick chase scene, and I was fully on board. The story had been a bit too complex for me before so I was determined to figure out the adult themes. It was during Nick Cageâs last voice over monologue into the hard cut to credits that I had what I remember as my first thoughts about the relationship between sadness and humor.
Years later, when I became of age to rent and dub videos, I devoured their stuff. Millerâs Crossing and Big Lebowski were the standouts but I liked it all up until Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) with its shitty lip-synched fake-ass country music. Then stuff from Homerâs Odyssey happens because thatâs what the story is based on. I paid all of the no money I had to see it in theater. It was a bad experience. I remember watching The Man Who Wasnât there but I couldnât get interested in it, too boring. I was turned off.
I enjoyed No Country For Old Men (2007) and True Grit (2010) as prestige films made in a style I could enjoy. They had some of the quirks but a different spirit. They were great adaptations of great stories but they werenât Coen stories. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) was a fun Covid watch.
I was surprised a couple years ago when I randomly watched Hail, Caesar! (2016) during a severe period of autistic burnout. It was breezy and delightful if a bit dumb. I kind of wanted more but the burnout kept me from doing any research and I just kind of found The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009) that seemed to be Clooney trying to carry some of that Coen energy whilst they were off doing their prestige work. Itâs neither good nor loathsome IMO.
So Iâm in the hotel room and Burn After Reading is on. Itâs pretty good I think. It was after Brad Pitts character had been removed from the movie so I didnât even know he was in the movie until I sat down to write this. I think I liked it though. At least it made me think about some of the stuff I skipped. Hereâs the list:
Intolerable Cruelty (2003) - Romcom co-written with Matt Stone of South Park - Hard pass
The Lady Killers (2004) - Interested
A Serious Man (2009) - Interested
Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) - I get bad vibes from this. I can get triggered when some film makers romanticize lives of musicians/artists and I donât trust the Coens with this subject after Oh Brother - pass
So I have a couple of things I might check out that may hit the pressure points I enjoyed so well as a young person. Sick. Worth the trip. I must have fallen asleep during the credits because the next thing I remember is being woken up by silly sex scene music for a weird soft-core movie and having to turn off the TV. Nice, the Fae force of somebody elseâs video playlist was having a laugh. I fell back asleep looking forward to the next nightâs surprises. It was nothing good, though there were historical lessons to be sure.
The Hateful Eight (2015)
I caught this pretty close to the beginning and didnât realize it was Tarantino until the N-Word starts getting thrown around willy-nilly, and itâs the guy from Fallout saying it mostly. There was a detective aspect to it for a while that did make it interesting for a bit. It just becomes a bloodbath and completely drops the intrigue for the last 20 minutes. The ending is weirdly nihilistic and very unsatisfying. Nobody ends up being at all relatable or likeable, just ugliness up and down.
Interesting that this was the last Tarantino movie done with Weinstein. Itâs about as pre-woke as a movie can be in my estimation, in a lot of ways.
I think I dozed slightly between movies, or maybe I changed channels to about 5-10 minutes into the finale of this two-night engagement. If the first night was themed around inoffensiveness, the second was clearly the opposite. A real ice and fire kind of affair. I came to this realization when I saw what it was and buckled down in the hotel bed for a wild ride.
Speaking of pre-wokeâŚ
American Beauty (1999)
Holy shit this movie suuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks. I still canât believe how bad it is and itâs been almost a week now. The other night, at a gathering of like minded individuals, I was relating this portion of my tale in a conversation. One of my delightful conversation partners posed the question, âWorst Best Picture?â I had to pause and consider my deficient knowledge of Oscar history but soon came to the conclusion, âEasily, in a walk.â
This movie is so bad that I felt like my heart was about to burst, from the shittiness, and then it did burst, over and over again in contempt. Iâm very glad that I was forced to watch this broadcast style with no pause or rewinds because I would have been up all night making sure that what I just saw or heard was as brazenly sophomoric as I had perceived. I wonder, was this just comparatively better than the other mainstream stuff at the time? Iâm convinced you can hear The Monster Kevin Spaceyâs disdain for the âfirst high-school creative writing assignmentâ style prose in his voice over. I remember when I first saw it, long before knowing what a nasty man he was, having no idea what the big fuss was over his acting. I was seventeen though and willing to overlook a lot for a movie with boobs at a time when jpegs could still take a few minutes to fully download.
Annette Benning and Peter Gallagher are actually pretty good in it. Theyâre the only examples of actors having chemistry in the entire film. However, her character is villainized in such a cartoonish way that only serves as an attempt to justify the inappropriate actions of Spaceyâs character. Truly (American) ugly stuff.
I simply canât go too deep on my disdain for the peeping Tom drug dealing boyfriend character. $2000 for an eighth of government weed in 1999? Could that be the most ridiculous part of the movie?
âWhy are you filming that dead bird?â Jane asks.
âBecause itâs beautiful.â
âNo itâs not, Ricky Fitts! Dead birds are yucky, you IDIOT!â I scream at the screen from the hotel bed.
âAnd so are dead girlfriend dads, you psycho!â
A truly poisonous characterization from an utterly toxic piece of trash media. What was in the water at that time?
âŚ
I feel like there is a reason, or there is something I should take from fate having shown me these movies over those two nights. Itâs put me into a contemplative mood, perhaps appropriate for the end of the year. 2008, the year Burn After Reading came out, was objectively the worst year of my life and made it so I couldnât watch a lot of movies anymore, especially alone, because of PTSD symptoms. Before then, I watched movies almost every day, sometimes several. Iâve been trying to watch more movies this year and feel I may be ready to start watching horror movies alone again soon. That will be nice but even thinking about it makes me want to put it off another year. In the meantime I have a couple of Coen brothers movies Iâll need to track down and then re-evaluate my thoughts on their late era.
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would reconsider two of these:
Lady Killers is a racist film, and it manages to be an even worse film than Intolerable Cruelty
Inside Llewyn Davis is very antiromantic/cynical about its subject matter and is worth a watch even if you have some trepidations
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was wrapping gifts today, so lots of time for Christmas Movies:
Klaus (Netflix)
really has heart, i have to admit that all that praise was right.
Didnât wrap anything during this, so that speaks for this movie.
Irish Wish (Netflix)
Trash, but my kind of trash. Only thing that threw me off was that Triumph starting every time w/o any hiccupsâŚ
Meet me Next Christmas (Netflix)
Trash, yet falls short of being cool trash. Never really heard of Pentatonix before, and wasnât sure if these are a real band or a sham.
Transformers One (BR)
THAT is a movie that almost doesnât deserve being as good as it turned out to be, and the VO cast is just obscene. Fishburne, Johansson, Buscemi, Hamm, HemsworthâŚ
The trailer didnât do the movie justice, and it might be the second best out of all TF movies on my list 
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a serious man is a much livelier coen brothers do existentialism movie than the man who wasnât there, i like it a lot and rewatch it every few years
wait, that must make it my favorite coen brothers movie by a wide margin. weird.
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also i take umbrage at calling a 120 year old ralph stanley singing o death âfake-ass country musicâ but everything about the presentation of the south in that movie seemed pretty fake so i think i get where youâre coming from
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i saw like 5â10 minutes of Fargo the other day and idk if it was very particular timing but i walked away talking about how i thought they made a different movie every time but Fargo was just No Country + Serious Man really
never thought about it before but there really are some similarities between jerry lundegaard and larry gopnik in their inability to learn lessons that are made very obvious to the audience
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McCarthy originally wrote No Country as a screenplay in the late '80s and itâs not the kind of thing he would have ever copped to but I think Blood Simple must have been an influence on it, which ends up being a curious sort of ouroboros
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I donât mean to offend, and maybe call me anything you like (snob may be accurate) based off of this opinion, I just donât think any real ass country tops the Billboard chart or wins any Grammy awards. At least nothing I want to hear more than once. And George Clooney badly lip-syncing to the same badly produced song twice in the same movie is the only reason anybody bought the record anyway.
Also, for accuracy, Ralph Stanley was 72 when he auditioned for and recorded the track in 1999 for this cat:
(edit: I just think this is a funny picture of T-Bone Burnett)
I know several dudes in their 70s who gig nearly every weekend⌠I mean, 72 is old but it ainât 120 by several (country) miles 
Anyway, I figured Iâd catch some flack and itâs all good. We all like what we like.
nah itâs fine, i donât think the movieâs soundtrack is amazing, and while i found that one track impactful as a teenager itâs not the version i go back and listen to (and it was integrated into the movie awkwardly besides). but there has been a lot of much faker country music put out over the decades and from the limited context in your post it wasnât clear if the judgment was coming from a place of snobbery or ignorance. iâll also grant that the overly glossy version of man of constant sorrow that plays such a prominent role in the movie is one of the weakest songs on it. but at least no one mentions trucks or patriotism in the whole thing
Inside Llewyn Davis isnât anything like O Brother Where Art Thou but I still donât think youâd like it. I do think people are probably going to be rewatching it after the Bob Dylan movie comes out
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