I liked ToL too, and this movie has a lot in common with it in terms of how it approaches childhood, but ToL is just so bloated. I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch anything else he has done since that, but I might see the new one since I like music and watching live performances and stuff.
There’s a big pacing thing as well. Personally, long panning shots, sparse meditative narration hits a wavelength that I can watch for hours; I am enraptured.
Despite not having grown up in midcentury Texas Tree of Life hits right in the specificity and universality notes that get me in the gut. I get weepy in movies when they speak to universals of humanity; acts of great kindness or evil (but especially kindnesss). Tying the two together is exactly how I think and feel about this while it’s also a novel approach. Usually a narrative’s specifics can be inferred to be universal but here it’s just directly stated: this is one, this is all, all, all
Hidden Figures is pretty bad. There is nothing less cinematically interesting than people pretending to solve math equations on black boards. Someone reassure me that Janelle Monáe gives a better performance in Moonlight.
She’s not bad in it, but kind of forgettable. She’s one of those people who is almost too good looking to be believable in movies. I think she was cast just because wkw also casts musicians sometimes
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I saw Get Out. I thought it was pretty good, but I felt the ending wasn’t great. I just watched The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and it has a similar ending (person tied to chair while a family prepares to do bad stuff to them escapes from their house, broadly) and I think it really put the whole thing in a harsh light. I think it needed to either commit to being a hallowing escape like TCSM or a cathartic explosion of bloodshed like the end of The Descent. It’s trying to half and half it and it doesn’t really work as well as you would hope.
Between that and A Cure for Wellness this seems like a pretty cool year for horror so far. Particularly, both of those movies get very bizzare which is always nice to see.
(The animatronic deer skeleton from the trailers got cut which was disappointing. The puppeteers are still in the credits tho)
Oh, Get Out’s opening is really good, also!
Get Out owns.
Moonlight really got to me at the end 
The tension breaking with that image of one man holding the other is powerful stuff
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I didn’t know what thread to put this in but I want to imagine Vin Diesel and Amy Adams being best friends and playing tabletop games together now.
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just realized that until this very moment i was not entirely positive that amy adams was not also the lady from the office
and also that rachel mcadams was a third, entirely unrelated entity
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The Strawberry Blondes are an elite crew
I find amy adams intensely, aggravatingly, julia stiles-tier bland
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look, that’s great about Amy Adams and all
can we talk about Vin’s nose hair
Amy Adams would definitely be the GM because Vin always wants to play his witch hunter character, and they would only ever play DnD but what edition? I know Vin doesn’t care at all but I want to know Amy Adams’s hot takes on edition wars
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none of us are getting any younger
I saw that Lego Batman and am I being stupid or did a movie that consists entirely of references to things make the dinosaurs from Jurassic Park male? Like, is it a kit based on JP3 or what
vin is turning magoo
I watched two films on a plane.
To Rob A Thief (Spainish) was very okay bank job film. The whole film is the bank job and it has a spoiler mechanical hook that I am still thinking about. Recommend watching it on a plane. It is a good hook! To realize at the end of the film.
The Maltese Falcon is one of those classics where Humprey Bogart is a complete asshole and women characters are really poorly written. Peter Lorre is fucking great though. This is the first film I really noticed how great he is. Then found out he was the lead in M an arthouse classic I really didnt like.
And based on when he died and no further research I am goinng to assume he died from the bad coke that killed most of Hollywood in the 60s.
Please tell me more films where Peter Lorre just Peter Lorre’s around.
Finally got around to watching X-Men First Class and Days of Future Past.
First Class was fairly terrible, the worst thing being a hilariously intrusive soundtrack that made me think I was watching an unfinished screener with placeholder music.
Days of Future Past was some hot garbage, but much more entertaining. Cool to see the first two xfilms’ band back together, but much like a reunion album, the magic wasn’t really there. The absolute best thing about it is that it retcons The Last Stand out of existence.