i watche the netflix movie where george clooney has a beard and tries to talk to space
it’s pretty bad, just wanted to let y’all know
a twist in literally the last five minutes of the movie cause it to fail to break the streak of every non-horror space movie somehow also being about estranged fathers reconnecting with their children, stealth space-dad movie is even worse than space-dad movie, at least ad astra was bold enough to wear that on its sleeve
For the first time maybe ever I caught most of The Polar Express and I guess it has some decently imaginative action setpieces but god every character in the movie except the girl is so annoying
ad astra was sick because there is absolutely zero subtext to it.
yeah, james gray is very european in his sensibilities that way – his big budget movies are all explicitly about something in a way that doesn’t necessarily follow from the production design
I thought you knew it already! It was in like every blockbuster throughout the early 00s
lost city of z did very little for me, and really put me off him quite a bit tbh, but seeing ad astra being exactly the same as the yards or we own the night but on a 100 million $ budget in space felt really rad.
i saw tenet and argued with my brother that it was actual dogshit and “worse than TROS”
he thought it was “interesting”
tenet was so bad i never want to watch another nolan film. i want my however long that was back
that’s how I felt about Interstellar but I liked Tenet alright
Oh. That peaks my interest I should have walked out of City of Z. Not because of it’s badness just that it was exactly what it was in the first 15 minutes and that remained extremely uninteresting to me for the entire run time:
I wouldn’t say it was worse than star wars 9 but it was comically bad. It was mind numbingly dull and pointless but it didn’t make me despair over the art of filmmaking as a whole the way disney movies do
I gotta see it cause I hear it’s pretty stupid and any time a HUGE movie makes audiences really conflicted I get interested.
I thought tenet was alright. I thought denzel washington’s kid was good at being a stoic soldier type, and his best buddy robert pattinson is nice. the woman interjecting “including my kid” when people are talking about everyone dying was definitely one of the dumber things I’ve heard in a movie though and it’s really annoying that everyone is just shooting at random things for no reason in the call of duty temporal warfare level at the end. and with their selector switches on automatic fire too, if that wasn’t enough.
the visual conceit of tenet just makes every action scene significantly less interesting to watch than if it was normal.
Underrated part of home alone is how useless the cops are
I can find a reason to post about Night of the Comet any time of the year. In this case, it’s Christmas adjacent.
Soul is the first Pixar movie that is like not even pretending to be a kids movie and is just fully made with an audience of middle aged people in mind. I loved it but it’s incredible to think of someone trying to show it to an 8 year old.
got around to watching parasite and damn what a phenomenal fucking movie in every possible aspect, definitely oscar worthy even if the oscars don’t mean jack shit
recent movies watched:
Basic Instinct (1992): this kinda feels like lesser Verhoeven to me tbh. i get the whole point of the movie is that everyone (especially the protagonist) is a sleazebag, and i do like how much it uses the setting of San Francisco… sort of like a grotesque version of Vertigo, which i imagine might have been some of the intention behind it. there were some funny scenes in there. but i dunno man. it ain’t no Showgirls to me.
Carol (2015): this was a rewatch. it’s a period romantic melodrama that feels elevated because of some good filmmaking (and not idealizing the era that it’s from, but also not making everyone in that era out to be Totally Evil). maybe a boringly good movie, but it’s still a good movie. also i watched it mostly because Basic Instinct left a bad taste it my mouth and i wanted to watch a movie with lesbians i could feel good about. it succeeded there.
But I’m a Cheerleader (1999): fun campy gay movie featuring a shockingly young Natasha Lyonne (of Russian Doll fame)! also inexplicably it has RuPaul in a role i don’t hate. i imagine this movie is cathartic for anyone who was forced to sit through Christian anti-gay conversion therapy bullshit. good ridiculous set design and costumes also.
PeeWee’s Big Adventure (1985): several different people have recommended this movie to me over the years and i just never saw it for whatever reason until now. i said this on letterboxd: “it feels like everyone making the movie is having fun being part of the creative process and not thinking too much about what the rules are or what they’re supposed to be doing. it’s almost accidentally great.” kinda like Godard in the way that it intentionally breaks with a lot of conventions… or for a lower-brow comparison, the ending to Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles (not a movie it’s easy to admit you liked nowadays but i always thought the ending was great). but yeah. fun movie!
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989): i am honestly shocked i didn’t see people constantly making the hack comparison with this movie in the last few years of Trump, because everything about it screams that to me. i guess Trump was a creature of the 80’s though, and this movie was a response to that. it’s really hard to talk about everything in this movie without coming off too obvious. so many people i have been around or witnessed online are the Thief character in this movie - they don’t really truly understand or enjoy anything (aside from having power), but they’ve built an image up of being some kind of authority about things and they will never shut up about it ever again. definitely a five star movie, and a good one to watch in tandem with The Act of Killing imo.
Batman Returns (1992): i watched this because i was feeling deeply depressed about the season and wanted something that was as much the opposite of a wholesome family Christmas movie as possible, while still technically being a Christmas movie. i think i have some kind of long sublimated memory of this coming out as a kid (i definitely remember Batman being very popular around then), but i don’t think i ever saw more than small pieces of it. i say long sublimated because Catwoman probably brought up a lot of stuff with gender and sexuality for me that i was forced to repress for many many years, only to arise as an adult.
this movie did a surprisingly good job of shoving a bunch of storylines in one and making it feel like it all worked together in the end. and it was a bold move to make Batman kind of a secondary character in the story. i said this on twitter but in contrast to the whole faux-uplifting imperialist “lean-in” power fantasy garbage a lot of newer superhero movies adapt, i really like this movie’s view of costumed superheroes (and villains) as weird obsessive loner sex freaks with big traumas and bruised egos who do what they do mostly out of compulsion. i can relate to… all of those things. that actually feels way more empowering to me than current superhero movies as an aging weird loner artfreak even if it’s not an empowerment fantasy per se. and indeed, Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman is the only movie superhero i’ve ever related to on a deep level.
and when you compare the world modern studio writers and producers and actors live in this makes sense, especially next to the '80 and '90s ‘art weirdo looking trying to break into a locked-down corporate production’ perspective. Today the entire fishtank is, have I done enough to expose my brand online today? have I used my acknowledged privilege to help my tax-deductible self-named charity organization? Have I appropriately networked with my peer group?
