Movies I Watched January 2024 - Greenfield Writes

A Man and a Woman - dir. Claude Lelouch

Romance

Love as a healing experience, love as a form of remembrance. With the gentle hand of Claude Lelouch the viewer is guided through the somber romance of Anne and Jean-Louis, which carefully unfolds as they process their grief over their deceased spouses. The movie moves at a snail’s pace but it’s never boring, quite the opposite. Even when nothing is happening but idle conversation, I still feel a sense of heady wonder at the nostalgically sepia cinematography, wrapping the romance up in a bow of visual splendor. A beautiful movie that has its fingerprints in many modern romances (such as Eternal Sunshine). 7/10.

Night Zoo - dir. Jean-Claude Lauzon

Crime/Surrealist

Not unlike the late Lauzon’s only other feature film (Leolo) Night Zoo is, in a word, gratuitous. Not necessarily a bad thing, but Leolo’s strength is that it counterbalances its gratuity with a surrealist sense of humor, which Night Zoo totally lacks. The premise is begging to be labelled a black comedy, but instead all I get is torture porn. I respect Lauzon’s ambitions in both of his films, but this does not work for me. 4/10.

Audition - dir. Takashi Miike

Psychological Horror

Genuinely at a loss for words.

Genuinely cannot believe this is real.

Genuinely could not take my eyes off of the screen for the last half-hour.

Can’t even form paragraphs. This is impeccable filmmaking.

It’s subtle enough in its critique of misogyny to where you feel rewarded for spotting it, but also not so buried under symbolism to where the average film-goer won’t be able to pick it up.

It’s brutal enough to make you feel like you need to disinfect yourself afterwards, but never feels cheap in any way.

Yes, Asami is psychopathic. But is she entirely wrong? Aoyama went along with an elaborate scheme to get a wife. He treated women like meat. He may be a good father, but the point of the movie is that misogyny is more subconscious than anything. It makes this point marvelously because while we empathize with Aoyama, we can recognize through the power of film that he made his own bed. He knew nothing about her, only that she superficially met his desires.

Misogyny breeds psychopathy. 10/10.

The Landlord - dir. Hal Ashby

Political Comedy/Drama

Beginning my dive into Hal Ashby’s filmography. Very excited because Harold and Maude was my favorite movie as a younger teenager. My anticipation increased tenfold as I watched The Landlord, because this is a brilliant, illuminating piece of cinema from a hippier time.

The Landlord tackles topics that would probably be controversial even by today’s standards; think gentrification, Black pride, white privilege, etc. The movie is centered around a rich white trust fund baby buying a property in a Black neighborhood with plans to demolish it and build himself a cutesy loft. I don’t like spoiling the plot in my reviews too much but things get a lot more interesting once we see his dynamics with the Black residents and his growing consciousness of his own family’s bigotry.

The movie isn’t particularly subtle in its scathing criticism of white liberal ignorance, but for me it works because of how well-explored and lived-in the environment feels. I really felt the love behind the camera as it explored block parties, dance clubs, and apartments, with Ashby’s satirical, yet empathetic eye always keeping focus on the heart behind everything.

P.S. LOVE the soul soundtrack. GodDAMN. 8/10.

Past Lives - dir. Celine Song

Romance

Disappointed because the premise, on paper, was something that I thought would totally blow me away. It’s still a good movie, but in my opinion it never pushes the envelope far enough for me to fall head over heels in love with it. Cute? Sure. Moving? A little, I guess. Groundbreaking? Hell nah. 7/10.

The Boat That Rocked - dir. Richard Curtis

Comedy/Historical

Plays a potential rape as a wholesome fun gag which put a huge damper on what was already a pretty unfunny movie. 2/10.

In the Cut - dir. Jane Campion

Erotic Thriller

Badly wanted to like this. I have a lot of respect for Campion as a director. She won me over way back when I first watched Power of the Dog but I haven’t enjoyed the other films of hers that I’ve seen. In the Cut is in theory a movie I would like (an erotic thriller that criticizes the male gaze, PLUS it stars Meg Ryan who I adore as an actress), but the pieces never came together. However, I have a feeling that some of my followers would enjoy this a lot more than I did. A smarter feminist eye could likely pick up on some of the stuff I was missing. 4/10.

Harold and Maude - dir. Hal Ashby

Absurdist Romance

I think I first saw this when I was twelve years old. My dad, who was an indie filmmaker before I was born, made it his absolute mission, I think, his whole raison d’etre even, to traumatize me as much as possible through film. My younger brother and I were shown Eraserhead at the ripe age of three and eight, respectively. I was shown Princess Mononoke at six.

So I suppose it just makes sense that one of the defining films of my life, without me even realizing it, was an absurdist love story about a suicidally ideated teenager and a wizened, kind-hearted, flighty Holocaust survivor.

When I was a kid I didn’t even catch that stuff. I just found their love story so moving, poignant, sweet. I thought Harold’s suicide antics were funny. And sure, they’re funny now. But as a kid, I didn’t appreciate Maude’s trauma. She’s a ray of sunshine in the world, but that defining characteristic came with a massive, heart-wrenching asterisk, and that’s the fact that Maude survived one of humanity’s darkest, most macabre moments. Where Maude comes from unimaginable tragedy and hardship, Harold comes from a bubble of privilege. This of course also has an asterisk but the contrasts between these two characters is important to highlight.

Maude works as an antithesis to Harold. Her unyieldingly cheery disposition pierces its way into his darkly cynical soul. We don’t see Harold’s glazed look evaporate into a smile until he first talks to Maude.

Something else that struck me when I rewatched this film is Ashby’s hilarious critique of conservative America and its attempts to mold Harold into a traditional man. Under a less intelligent filmmaker this political insight could’ve been squandered. Luckily the hippie was put in charge.

The older I get the more I relate to Harold, actually. And I think that’s a big reason this movie had such a uniquely profound impact on me back when I watched it at 12 and now at 21. For a long time I considered this my absolute favorite movie. And I don’t know, maybe it is, maybe when I rewatch it in my thirties, I’ll discover even more about it that I love. Maybe when I get really old, maybe eighty if I’m lucky, I’ll rewatch it yet again, and maybe THEN I’ll fully understand Maude, and her many victories against the onslaught of tragedy that life can be, sometimes, if you let it.

I don’t want to let it. I want to be like Maude.

Bless you, Ruth Gordon.

10/10.

Almost Famous - dir. Cameron Crowe

Coming-of-Age/Music

Intoxicating, down-to-earth, almost impossible to describe in words. Genuinely struggle with conveying how much this connected to me. Maybe it’s because I had a short stint in music journalism? Maybe it’s because I watched the extended cut and managed to find myself sucked into the movie’s nostalgic quicksand? Whatever it is, it’s incredible. 9/10.

Desert Hearts - dir. Donna Deitch

Romance

One of those movies that’s impossible to hate. I am kind of a sucker for stories about lesbians because they usually have very good direction, compelling characters, well-choreographed and un-sleazy sex scenes, and Desert Hearts met my expectations in all of these departments. However, it doesn’t go much further than that. I do think I would go crazier for this movie if I was a lesbian and not a straight dude. So to all my lesbian followers, I once again highly recommend this. This one’s for you. 6/10.

The Last Detail - dir. Hal Ashby

Comedy/Drama

Futility is the name of the game in Hal Ashby’s third film, which, similar to its two predecessors feature some scathing critique of the conservative United States. Two naval officers are tasked with taking an 18 year old klepto soldier to jail, where he will do eight years time. What was it that he stole, exactly? Or more accurately, what did he ATTEMPT to steal? Forty-dollars. That’s almost a decade of this kid’s life spent rotting in a cell for a forty-dollar crime.

The movie makes it pretty clear that this kid does not deserve that kind of treatment, but unfortunately, like I said–futility is the name of the game. Despite their budding friendship with the kid, Badass and Mule can’t ever break the metaphorical chains that bind them. They’re trapped in a paradigm of masculinity, of order, of violence. The movie doesn’t end with a climactic scene of their uprising, it ends with them taking verbal abuse and then shit-talking their superior afterwards, in private. Nothing is resolved. Business goes on.

That’s futility right there. Ashby’s track record shows him as a highly empathetic filmmaker with a bitterly cynical edge, and there’s no finer example than this film. The system is broken, the film tells us, and resistance is futile.

But maybe three dudes can still have a good time together? 8/10.

Maestro - dir. Bradley Cooper

Music/Biographical

I loved A Star Is Born. It’s not a perfect film but it’s powerful and I still find myself thinking about it a lot. Bradley Cooper has long been an actor I’ve appreciated but it was that role that cemented him as one of my favorites, and I was excited to see him continue his path as an auteur with Maestro.

Reviews rolled in and it seemed like the movie was receiving mixed reviews. My peers on this app mostly disliked it, and to be honest, I didn’t actually give much of a fuck. If anything it made me more excited because people didn’t really fuck with A Star Is Born either.

You have no idea how sad I am right now. I was ready to call this my movie of the year, unironically. I was so fucking ready to do that, just slap it in my top 1, no problem. 9/10. Instant classic. Cooper don’t miss.

Sadly this is not what happened, because while Cooper’s direction has vastly improved, the script here is just… so lackluster. So boring. So lacking in personality or charm. The central conflict of the story is one that could’ve been vaguely transposed onto just about any major musical figure. It doesn’t feel specific to Bernstein at all, besides the gay stuff.

I don’t know much about Bernstein as a figure, but that’s the thing, I don’t even feel like I learned much watching this. I was just bored out of my mind because the characters were giving me nothing. I never felt much of a reason to care. Simply put, there was NOTHING to latch onto for me.

This would be a 3/10 if the movie didn’t look so fucking good. 4/10.

Inside Men - dir. Woo Min-ho

Political Thriller

A political thriller that really rewards you if you’re paying close attention to it. In a lot of ways I felt like I was immersed in the investigation and trying to figure out how to put the pieces together myself. However, I do think the ending drops the ball in how it spells the big twist out. Like the movie doesn’t trust the audience to figure out what happened. Still, super satisfying movie to watch. 7/10.

Shampoo - dir. Hal Ashby

Sex Comedy

I love a good himbo movie, and I would honestly be a lot crazier about this one if the pieces came together more succcintly. For one, as much as I thought George’s ridiculous sex appeal was funny, I just didn’t get it. It would be one thing if you made him a genuinely decent woman appreciator who just happened to also be a cheating douchebag, but I never got the sense that he was any different from the more traditionally patriarchal men in the movie. He’s just kind of a douchebag, but what makes him relatable is just how brutally honest the movie gets with showing how his uncontrollable libido causes him to fail. It reminds me of Five Easy Pieces. The difference being that in Shampoo there’s a political slant as well, with the story taking place around the date of Nixon’s election. To be completely honest—and this might just be on me for not familiarizing myself enough with the political landscape at the time—I didn’t get how the two ideas were connected. It just seemed like window dressing. Still a fun sex comedy, though. 7/10.

Flora and Son - dir. John Carney

Music/Drama

John Carney is not in peak form in Flora and Son. The songs aren’t good, the chemistry between the characters isn’t there, and in terms of what it’s trying to say I’m at a bit of a loss. With Sing Street and Begin Again, the message is pretty clear—music can heal. I believe this movie was trying to apply that message to a mother-son relationship, but none of the character beats here felt earned to me. 5/10.

The Whale - dir. Darren Aronofsky

Melodrama

Something felt very, very off about this movie for the first hour and I couldn’t figure it out, but then it hit me—the main character is a fucking caricature. He does not feel remotely believable for even a second. Brendan Frasier is doing his best but good acting can’t save a script that treats its central character like a prop for the audience to use as teardrop lubricant.

Aronofsky movies are usually carried entirely by their visual shock value so I’m not surprised he fails to grasp the very idea of complexity in characters. The more of his movies I watch, the more alienated I feel from his vision. How do we make the audience care about obese guy? Just make him look as sad and pathetic as humanly possible and also make him the nicest, sweetest lil guy in the world. Awww. Don’t you just feel so fucking guilty?? No bitch lmao. I know that’s Brendan Frasier in a fat suit, why is your entire script just a gigantic fucking pity party?

On top of just having a pathetic excuse for a main protagonist, the rest of the cast just does not stack up to Brendan Frasier at all (and he’s not even THAT good). Look, Sadie Sink is fine, but I do not buy her mean girl schtick for a single second. Come the fuck on. So ham-fisted. Get fucking real. The mormon kid? He needs to go back to acting class because I get secondhand embarrassment watching him flub his way through a scene. Hong Chau is good though. She doesn’t have to do much but she at least knows what the fuck she’s doing.

Aronofsky’s whole schtick is definitely starting to wear off on me. Please talk to some actual people before you write a script man. I’m begging you. Your metaphors are not nearly smart enough to justify everyone talking like they’re in a wattpad fanfiction. 3/10.

Shithouse - dir. Cooper Raiff

Slice-of-Life/Romance

This review will get extremely personal, so if you’re not interested in reading that, all good. I wrote this more for myself than anything, but I figure some of my letterboxd homies might find a more personal entry interesting too.

Back when I was 19, the same age as Alex (the protagonist), I had just gone through maybe the roughest six months of my life. A lot of it was a product of my own immaturity and stupidity but at the time, my anxiety was at its worst. I had just broken up with my high school girlfriend, I was on dating apps, I was basically trying to escape my undiagnosed, untreated anxiety with sex. I shit you not, during this time I probably would’ve had sex with anybody. I was THAT fucking out of my gourd.

At the time, I thought drugs would help. I smoked weed here and there, and then my best friend and I got ahold of some shrooms, and I had a pretty great trip. So great in fact that I decided to microdose for a month.

It was during this month that I met Maggie.

Her name is important, because while it would be incredibly fucking embarrassing if she somehow ended up reading this, it’s worth mentioning because the romantic interest in this film is called Maggie as well. And while watching it… well it was a big part of my experience with this film. I can’t lie.

I met Maggie on Tinder. Somehow, she swiped right on me. This is a big deal because in case you don’t know, people swiping right on you unprompted is basically a once-every-couple-of-days type thing for men. At least for me it is. It just doesn’t happen. And what made this time EXTRA special was the fact that Maggie was EXACTLY my type. To a T. She was a couple of years older than me, she was artsy, I could tell she was funny as fuck. Cannot emphasize enough how instantly I was smitten.

So we started texting, hitting it off, and it just so happened that she was going to a concert tomorrow night, and she wanted me to come along. So I bought a ticket, and I spent the next day eagerly waiting for her to pick me up, as we planned. I got in her car, we made our way to the concert, and the whole time we’re talking I just feel this sense of wonder. Like, holy shit man. What the fuck is this girl doing with me. I don’t even have my fucking driver’s license yet. I still have cystic acne all over my face. I am a 19 year old loser. I am mentally still in fucking high school. How the FUCK could she be attracted to me?

The concert is amazing. She’s way funnier than me which is something that REALLY just makes me fall for her even more. At some point some other girl at the concert goes up to us and tells us that we look super hot. I feel like I’m in a dream. We get back to her car, we start making out, we eventually drive back to the city, near her place, we keep making out, I take her shirt off, she takes off mine.

Then she lights a blunt. An actual blunt, straight out of her fucking dimebag. She asks me if I want a hit. I say yeah, sure, I’ve smoked weed before. I mean, it was from a vape, but same thing, right? So I take a hit… and I cough my fucking lungs out. My throat is so fucking sore it hurts. But we keep making out. Everything’s fine for the first five minutes.

But then my heart picks up its pace. And not in a sexy way, in a way that’s making my entire body jitter and shake and twitch and I literally can’t fucking stop and why is it suddenly cold here? And why does her face keep… changing? Morphing? I start getting worried. What if her face never goes back to normal? I really like her face man. I don’t want it to change permanently. My heart’s going at a million miles an hour. We’re making out, I don’t feel good but I don’t want to seem like a loser so I just go with it. She eventually drops me off at home and I stumble back up into my room. I can’t sleep that entire night. I pace and pace and pace and pace and I text anybody who’ll listen to me to ask them if I’m going to be okay. If I’m supposed to react like that to weed.

The next morning I can’t even eat. For the next few days, my appetite is all but gone.

The only thing on my mind? Maggie.

We text here and there. It’s sporadic. Next weekend she wants to finish what we started. She wants to fuck. And me? I’ve convinced myself over the last three days that I’m in love with her. My brain was spread across the walls of my room like peanut butter and fucking jelly. I wrote a song about her. I learned a whole fucking recipe because I wanted to cook for her when she came over. I planned out a whole hiking picnic, I deep cleaned my room. I did all of this, and the ironic part is that I did it because I thought it was mature. She was two years older than me. I had to show her that I was a man.

I say ironic because now that I myself am 21, I can recognize that nothing about my behavior was that of a man. And I’m not saying that to shit on my teenage self. I’m literally saying that in hindsight, I was a boy.

When she came over, she looked… words failed me. She was wearing a hiking outfit. She had the most beautiul body I’d ever seen in my entire life. We hiked up the trail. We kissed at the top of the hill. We came back down to my place, and right before we had sex, she told me something. “Just so you know, I’m not looking for anything serious right now. I hope that’s okay.”

“Yeah, no, same,” I lied.

Then we had sex. And then afterwards she left. She had errands to run. I waved her off as she drove away, and then I went back inside, back up to my room, laid down on the carpet, and sobbed. My dog Benji laid down next to my head. I cried for half an hour, but then I pulled myself together and talked to a friend of mine about the whole experience. He assured me that if she enjoyed her time with me, there was no doubt I’d see her again. That made me feel better.

So I sent her text messages every now and then for a couple of weeks. Usually she’d see them, and sometimes she’d respond. But one day I texted her and it didn’t go through. I realized that she’d blocked me.

When I tell you this fucking destroyed me, I am not exaggerating. It has been two years and the experience has still left a scar on my soul.

The reason I share this story is because I really can’t NOT share it when it comes to reviewing this movie. Shithouse. A movie that only cut me as deep as it did because of this specific experience that I had. I’ve had that experience, of having this intensely personal sexual experience with someone, and for it to mean EVERYTHING to me and seemingly nothing to the other person. I’ve had this experience a few times. Hell, I’ve probably been on the other side of it too. What I love about Shithouse, and Cooper Raiff’s work in general, is its empathy. Maggie is NOT the villain. She certainly mistreats Alex, but Alex definitely misreads her too, and crosses a few boundaries.

For me, there’s something very honest about Cooper Raiff’s work. I don’t know. I guess I’ve just never really felt more connection to protagonists before? The emotional mama’s boy who means well but can’t quite make it all work. It’s deeply relatable to me. I really couldn’t hate this movie. I tried my best. I went into it hypervigilant that I wouldn’t blindly love it because of something as subjective as relatability, but I couldn’t honestly tell you that I hated this, or even disliked it. I loved it. I loved seeing a guy my age cry for reasons that weren’t abundantly tragic. And that’s the thing, right? Men don’t NEED a good reason to feel hurt, or to feel heartbroken, or sad, or anything. Our feelings and our pain matter. If you need to hear this as a man, let this be a reminder. You are not flawed for being emotional. You are not flawed for suffering. You are not a bad person for struggling, whether it be with dating, making friends, or your goals. I wish I’d known this at 19. I wish I hadn’t beaten myself up so hard for all of my mistakes.

You’re 19, Leo.

You’re going to go through a lot of heartbreak in the next year. But it’ll be okay, because you’ll meet someone who genuinely loves you for who you are. Someone who doesn’t require you to put up a facade, to play hard to get, to hide how you really feel. Someone who makes you feel like the hottest guy on the planet. You won’t recognize that at first. But then you’ll fly to Australia. Yeah, that’s actually gonna happen lol. Don’t ask. No man. You’re not gonna get laid there. But that’s my point. It doesn’t matter, because going to Australia will make you realize just how much you fucking love this girl, and the whole time you’re there you’re going to want to be back home instead. With her.

It’ll be okay. I think 2024 is gonna treat you well. 8/10.

Misery - dir. Rob Reiner

Psychological Horror

I am not lying when I say this movie made me actually nauseous. Downright queasy, even. Straight up wanted to vomit. The script is airtight, Kathy Bates is horrifying, and never have I ever wanted to quit writing more in my life. Just excellent. 8/10.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World - dir. Edgar Wright

Action/Comedy/Romance

Kieran Culkin is the only thing preventing this from a 4/10. 5/10.

Nashville - dir. Robert Altman

Ensemble/Musical Comedy

Monumental disappointment. Unless you’re City of God you can’t tell an ensemble narrative, sorry. This shit is just plain boring. 4/10.

Homework - dir. Jaime Humberto Hermosillo

Erotic

Starts off as an interesting experiment of eroticism, by the end left me questioning the role of sex and pornography in the nuclear family structure. 7/10.

Bound for Glory - dir. Hal Ashby

Biopic/Western

Ashby’s first miss. Just pure boredom. Christ almighty man. 3/10.

The Holdovers - dir. Alexander Payne

Comedy/Drama

-Probably the best dialogue of the year? Check.

-A leading trifecta of acting brilliance? Check.

-Cute 70’s vibes? Check.

-Cat Stevens? Check.

-Me, crying like a little bitch ass? Yep. 8/10.

Yi Yi - dir. Edward Yang

Drama

Visual literature. Life on a roll of film. The sum of all the the momentous decisions that make up the minutiae of our lives.

Edward Yang frames every scene so perfectly. Colors pop under his supervision. Things feel totally serendipitous. A light will change from red to green in the background halfway through a conversation and it’ll feel so meaningful, and yet you have to assume it was unplanned, right?

Life by a thousand cuts. How important are our decisions, really? I don’t know. Nobody here does, either. Characters grapple with this sad truth like ants in the urban sprawl. What do we do when we realize we will never get a second chance? When we realize that love passed us by all those years ago? How do we cope with our own cowardice? I don’t know.

Nobody here does, either. 8/10.

News From Home - dir. Chantal Akerman

Avant-Garde/Documentary

I see a few reviews describing Akerman’s portrayal of New York to be cynical or critical–like she’s showing us how the city swallows you up–but I disagree. I actually think this is quite an optimistic, human film about the intricate beauty of the urban tapestry.

We spend the movie through Akerman’s eyes as she navigates the endlessness that is New York. Subways, taxis, walkways, she takes us to every dingy shop corner and metro station alike, an omniscient, warm observer. We can see some people just go about their day, while others give curious glances towards the camera. Some appear amused, some wary.

For the most part, there is nothing all too significant to pay attention too, and yet I never felt bored watching this movie. Part of it is because I was born in New York, I spent a couple of my formative years there, and seeing a version of it in the 70’s captured with warm film grain makes my eyes happy. But it’s also that the empty nature of the film allowed me to meditate on it as it happened. I formed thoughts about the people I saw, the locations I dwelled in. I thought about Akerman’s mom, and how much she missed her daughter, how proud she must have been for her pursuing her dreams of filmmaking. And here we go back to what I said in my opening, that this is actually an optimistic film. Because, really, I think what we’re seeing is Akerman falling in love with her new home.

She starts off the film uneasy with the camera, keeping it mostly still. Maybe out of fear of upsetting her new neighbors, maybe out of insecurity. But as the film progresses, she eases into a documentarian role. She moves the camera gracefully through her environment, which at first seem so endlessly complicated until we pull back on a ferry that reveals it’s all small enough to fit into a square frame. All that noise, humanity, beauty, it’s all so small and precious. There’s something about seeing the twin towers that makes me nostalgic, even though I was born a year after they were destroyed. It’s like I’m being given a chance to explore my birthplace in a different epoch. For an hour and a half, I get to travel back in time. Isn’t that kind of wonderful? 8/10.

Bottle Rocket - dir. Wes Anderson

Comedy/Crime

Unironically one of my favorite Wes Anderson movies. You can tell that he was going through that “dude in their twenties” malaise when he crafted this thing. Charming losers trying to find love and purpose is a gateway into my heart. I genuinely had the biggest smile when Anthony was calling Inez. Just such a sweet movie. Wes at his most humanistic. 7/10.

Rushmore - dir. Wes Anderson

Comedy

The movie that made me a fan of Wes Anderson back when I first watched it as a kid. Also probably responsible for me being into MILFs? More data needed.

Not much I can really say. Just an aggressively charming movie with one of my favorite protagonists ever. Autistic king. 8/10.

Hell of High Water - dir. David Mackenzie

Crime/Western

Just suuuuuuuuuuper boring and poorly shot. Some of the ugliest, most overexposed cinematography I’ve ever seen. 3/10.

Coming Home - dir. Hal Ashby

War/Romance

Ashby at his Oscar-baitiest, for sure. Still, a moving picture of the collective postwar trauma of Vietnam. Even when Hal Ashby isn’t at his best he’s still the most empathetic director of all time. You can tell he’s got nothing but love and tenderness for his subject matter. 7/10.

Burying Old Alive - dir. Kim Ki-young

Fable

I don’t feel comfortable giving this a rating because similar to Awaara this is so far beyond the realm of what I find remotely enjoyable that I couldn’t even get into it.

I’ve been meaning to get into Kim Ki-young’s work for a while, seeing as he’s one of the godfathers of Korean cinema, but this might be a bad entry point. I’ve read his work is generally more psychosexual, but this movie plays out more like a fable or a stage play. This just does not connect with me at all. Sorry. I hope his other work speaks to me more though.

Being There - dir. Hal Ashby

Comedy/Drama

I find these kinds of movies insufferable. Stories about mentally disabled people are so hit or miss man, swear to god. For every Sling Blade there’s a Forrest Gump (watch Sling Blade btw). This is like a shitty precursor to Forrest Gump in all the worst ways. The main character makes zero decisions to progress the story, so all we’re really doing is watching him kinda bumble through the world without much direction, and there’s only so much of that I can take without my patience wearing thin. Passive characters are boring no matter what. I don’t care if your protagonist is mentally challenged–they need to be active in the story. 2/10.

Fifty Shades of Black - dir. Michael Tiddes

Parody

Believe it or not I actually thought this would be funny. 1/10.

Paranormal Activity 2 - dir. Tod Williams

Supernatural Horror/Found-Footage

Just awful but somehow not as terrible as it could’ve been. 2/10.

The Weasels’ Tale - dir. Juan José Campanella

Melodrama/Black Comedy

Surprised to see such a divisive split on this movie. I honestly thought it was one of Campanella’s finest. Melodrama was off the charts but I fucked heavy with it, the whole movie just had this soap opera vibe that really worked for me, probably due to the biting, sharp dialogue. A lot of meta humor that poked fun at film tropes without feeling unnatural or immersion-breaking (the main characters are film industry veterans). That entire final act is a delectable doozy of twists and turns. Too fire. 8/10.

Infinity Pool - dir. Brandon Cronenberg

Sci-Fi Horror/Surreal

Very much “my thing” (depraved sex, unsavory visuals, rich people bad) but it never really comes together to say anything particularly noteworthy or coherent. Nothing is really resolved. We get glimpses into a theme of unearned wealth and resultant hedonism but again, it never comes together. 6/10.

It Comes at Night - dir. Trey Edward Shults

Psychological/Post-Apocalyptic Horror

Nothing interesting, nothing new, nothing shocking, nothing horrifying, nothing touching, just a big nothing of a movie.

I would rather watch any schlocky Blumhouse garbage horror movie over this insipid lazy attempt at art house horror.

I just finished this movie like 5 minutes ago and I’ve already forgotten it. 2/10.

Pain and Glory - dir. Pedro Almodóvar

A smart movie, no doubt. Almodóvar communicates themes of age and regret with precision and exquisite taste. There’s a gentleness to the (clearly) autobiographical approach to this character study that I find very charming and likable. Unfortunately, I couldn’t quite click with this. 6/10.

Second-Hand Hearts - dir. Hal Ashby

Hideous abomination of a movie. A stain on Ashby’s filmography. Agonizingly grating lead performances. A script that reads like it was written by a seven-year old who just learned the word “quirky.” Just insufferable. 1/10.

As Tears Go By - dir. Wong Kar-wai

Crime/Romance

Strip away the weird unaddressed incest plotline and you get a potentially incredible story about two bros looking out for each other. Wong Kar-wai’s trademark atmospherics really do elevate a basic gangster movie to something special, but I genuinely do not understand the lead romantic pairing at all. I would honestly be okay with the incest if there was an ounce of chemistry but they talk like three times and there’s never any sense of passion or attraction. I was watching this with my girlfriend and we both agreed that Wah’s chemistry with Fly was unironically more compelling.

To make a long story short–this should’ve been gay. 5/10.

Anatomy of a Fall - dir. Justine Triet

Courtroom Thriller

By far the best scene in the movie is the argument. You know the one. That was the moment I knew I had to recommend this to my dad. Sadly, the ending is a massive letdown. Huge unnecessary epilogue. Just had this general feeling of “hold up, that’s it??” which could be hand-waved away by gesturing to the theme of ambiguity in justice and how there are no reliable narrators and how we don’t know the real story and yada yada yada but I still find it all just a little bit too convenient. A more clever screenplay would’ve found a way to believably subvert both of the predictable outcomes (suicide/murder) while also tying in some of the untouched elements of the script.

Honestly, a big reason I was disappointed was because it felt like there were so many possibilities for how an ending could’ve shaped up but we got the least interesting one. Triet could’ve shown earlier moments of her interview with the literature student, which would’ve brought the beginning full circle. That’s just one example, though. I don’t like giving ‘writing advice’ in my reviews because I find it insufferable, but I know that a potential response to my criticism of the ending is gonna be some shit like “oh yeah what would YOU have done.” So I’m just throwing it out there.

This is not a bad movie by any means. It really does most things well but lacks the conviction and artfulness required to cement it as a GREAT film–rather than just a good one. 7/10.

American Beauty - dir. Sam Mendes

Surreal Drama

Sad portrayal of the existential horror that is American middle class suburbia and the midlife crises that go along with it. Really the biggest issue I have with it is its cheesy script. Any scene involving the teenage characters felt like watching a shitty teen comedy attempt to be deep. I liked watching Carolyn and Lester grapple with the absolute horror of their failing marriage. I felt a tremendous amount of pity for both of them, but I’m confused about the ending, honestly. Lester’s fate should’ve been more entwined with Carolyn’s. The homophobic dad was just a very silly character I had a hard time taking seriously at any point. 6/10.

Good Morning - dir. Yasujirō Ozu

Slice-of-Life/Comedy

Stressful experience to try and watch this movie because with every minute that went by, all I was getting was meaningless repetitive suburban yammering occasionally interrupted by brief unfunny fart jokes, and the entire time all I kept thinking was “jesus christ I have so many other things I need to do this is excruciating oh my god oh my god”

At least it’s well shot though. 2/10.

Lookin’ to Get Out - dir. Hal Ashby

Buddy Comedy

Once you see Jon Voight credited as a writer, it’s impossible to shake the feeling that the barebones, cliche plot exists solely as a vehicle to demonstrate his improvisational acting chops. Him and Burt Young have on-screen chemistry, but this was far too derivative and long-winded for me to be engaged. 2/10.

Karen - dir. Coke Daniels

Thriller

One of the funniest movies ever made? 1/10.

Ouija - dir. Stiles White

Supernatural Horror

I really like these movies because they reassure me that you don’t need talent to get acting work. 1/10.

Mildred Pierce - dir. Michael Curtiz

Melodrama/Noir

Did not expect to like this as much as I did, given how much I generally hate Golden Age cinema, but Mildred surprised me. It’s a movie that feels ahead of its time in how it conveys moral grey in its characters. Mildred is ostensibly motivated by her love of her daughter, but my impression was that her daughter as a motivation was the excuse she told herself to permit her breaking gender norms.

It’s established early on in the movie that Mildred was raised to be a traditional housewife her entire life. Over the course of the movie, she pretty much does EXACTLY what she wants at every point of the movie, and this is naturally transgressive, given that even today female characters lack real agency in narratives (or are denigrated to supporting roles without being allowed to push the plot meaningfully). It’s especially transgressive because this was made in the forties, and Mildred is for all intents and purposes a “traditional” woman. Thus, it’s kind of insane that a housewife turned girlboss ends up almost singlehandedly pushing the plot forward. All major plot beats are proactive decisions from Mildred, or at worst, huge reactions.

Even rapey tropes like the woman eventually conceding sex to persistence are subverted here, because no matter how much Wally tries to smash, Mildred NEVER lets him. I feel like most movies would have her end up with Wally, but Mildred stands her ground every time and it’s dope.

That’s not to say this movie is uber-progressive or something. It might be feminist in its characterization of its lead character, but a lot of the other female characters basically get sidelined and reduced to stereotypes. The Black woman is a housekeeper, the working class woman is boyish and crude, and Mildred’s daughter is entertainingly horrible but nonetheless one-dimensional. I also feel this movie presents capitalism as an antidote to patriarchy. Girlboss shit is fun to watch but it’s definitely not peak feminism.

Regardless, a pretty dope oldie. 7/10.

King of the Ants - dir. Stuart Gordon

Noir/Horror

I shit you not, if the dialogue was just a LITTLE bit stronger I probably would’ve given this movie a full 10/10 score. This is such a bleakly nihilistic film that it spoke right to me in a way few films can, and it does that while also keeping me glued to my screen. I should not have eaten a full meal before sitting down for this because there are quite a few moments here that made it difficult to keep my food down.

I don’t want to give away too much about this movie because I believe it’s best to go in blind, but I will comment on some of the themes I picked up on and liked.

In contrast to movies like Everything Everywhere that take a more positive spin on the idea of nihilism (shit’s pointless but that’s okay because i love you uwu :3), King of the Ants is a complete tonal opposite. Our main character is one of the most average schmucks on the planet, and the reason this is important is because most of us are this guy. Most of us are kinda just trucking along without much direction or purpose, and sometimes when we try to engineer ourselves into a position of agency we end up realizing that the universe is a lot more cold-blooded and unreasonable than we might think.

Doing some research on Stuart Gordon, the filmmaker behind this, I found out that he’s taken a lot of inspiration from Lovecraft. I know as much about Lovecraft as your average terminally online schmuck, and his influence feels pretty apparent here. There’s an obvious connection being drawn between the insignificance with which humans regard ants (literally in a terrarium in a zoo being ogled at by much vaster beings) and humans themselves reckoning with their own insignificance.

I really fuck with this more terrifying, disturbed view of nihilism. And the more I write about this movie, the more I feel it deserves that 10/10 score. We’ll see how I feel. 9/10.

Y Tu Mamá También - dir. Alfonso Cuarón

You never know when you’ll see your best friend for the last time.

That’s not me being dramatic. I’m not gonna spill some crazy personal shit here, it’s not like one of my best friends died or something. But I had a friendship remarkably similar to Tenoch and Julio’s and the last ten minutes left me pretty much speechless.

He was my best friend for about 3 years and then our friendship petered out over the course of a year, and then we never spoke again. And sure, Tenoch and Julio could always hit each other up in the future, but… that’ll never happen. It just doesn’t make sense, not like it did before. There’s a certain context for these things, a context that once removed exposes the relationship and vaporizes it on the spot.

“Life is like the surf, so give yourself away like the sea.”

Maybe the most poignant line ever put into a screenplay? I know I tend to exaggerate sometimes but holy hell. I wish I could write something HALF this effortlessly brilliant. In just a single line, Luisa encapsulates the core theme of the movie; the ephemerality of love, life, politics, family, everything. The movie makes no attempt to give an answer to this reality. It merely presents the nature of youth and change as a given, and lets the audience do the rest.

I would probably let Maribel Verdu put her finger in my butt tbh. 9/10.

The Slugger’s Wife - dir. Hal Ashby

Romance

A depressing realization dawns as me as I make it an hour into this Ashby romance. This sick realization that the man I heralded as just maybe my new favorite filmmaker made not one, not two, not even three, but FOUR stinkers in a row. The first three? At least they give the game away pretty fast. This one is more insidious than that. It tricks you with glitz and cutesy charm. At first you think it’ll be about a doofus himbo growing up a bit. Nothing I haven’t seen before from Ashby, but still, it’s relatable, it’s fun, I like Daryl’s dynamic with Debbie enough.

As the movie creeps on, you start realizing that this relationship isn’t even particularly complex. It’s not a well-written ‘both sides’ situation where the characterization is strong enough that you feel you can understand both parties equally. It begins to dawn on me that I actually fucking despise the main character and find him completely insufferable. I have never wanted to deck an Ashby lead in the mouth more than right now.

But that’s okay. After all, Ashby excels at demonstrating the humanity in flawed men. Maybe he learns his lesson. Maybe we get some scenes that show him recognizing his flaws and changing for the better. Quite the opposite, unfortunately. His psycho behavior only gets worse. There’s a difference between Warren Beatty being a cheating lying manwhore in Shampoo and Michael O’Keefe being an absolute parasite of a human being, and I think the it comes down to CHARM. Shampoo’s script is CHARMING. The Slugger’s Wife is NOT.

Yet another huge fucking miss from Ashby. I really hope his last film leaves me on a better note. Nothing can save the back half of his filmography at this point but… it can’t be worse than this. 1/10.

The Lighthouse - dir. Robert Eggers

Folk Horror

Wasn’t sure what the symbolism here was until the final shot. Prometheus trying to steal fire from the gods and being punished. Very deep stuff.

I like Robert Eggers’ style a lot and I will probably watch anything he makes purely for that reason, but his characters are mostly all terrible. I actually found a lot of the character beats here downright laughable in their execution. I’m not sure if it was the goofy script or Pattinson’s choices as an actor but it was very hard to take anything seriously.

I get why people like this. The aspect ratio + obvious symbolism that makes you feel smart for picking up on it + seeing Edward Cullen in a serious role means that it’s guaranteed to land well with the film nerd audience but I still found this to be a dreary, overly repetitive experience with little payoff. It goes exactly where you’d expect with small moments of shock to tide over the repetition.

Meh. 5/10.

8 Million Ways to Die - dir. Hal Ashby

Neo-Noir

As Ashby’s final film, I’m just glad he went out on something okay. It doesn’t come close to his damn near perfect early career run, but as far as neo-noir thrillers go, it’s pretty solid. It chickens out in the end, and there are a ton of scenes in the middle that feel aimless or cliche, but it has a griminess to it that makes it stand out in Ashby’s oeuvre.

Jeff Bridges is truly phenomenal here, almost singlehandedly carrying most of this film on his own. Like MOST Ashby films, the acting is terrific. His reputation as an actor’s director makes perfect sense. If you read up on his approach, you can see that the man really was as compassionate as his work might suggest. He was a humanist through and through.

Despite ragging on the back half of his career, I can’t deny his brilliance. Harold and Maude, The Landlord, The Last Detail, all genius.

It’s been fun, Hal. 5/10.

Last Life in the Universe - dir. Pen-ek Ratanaruang

Romance

A tender story of a man crippled by OCD coming out of his shell. I wanted to love this a lot more than I did, but I still found the movie to be smart without being a good watch, necessarily. This is what I would’ve wanted Lost in Translation to be, really. The film’s unendingly languid pace works against it, in my opinion. Still, a gem that makes me want to check out more movies from the Thai New Wave. 6/10.

Fear and Desire - dir. Stanley Kubrick

War

Oh no Stanley baby what is you doin

2/10.

Dream Scenario - dir. Kristoffer Borgli

Black Comedy/Sci-Fi

Manipulative, mean-spirited, cruel, shallow, unfunny. Despise the gleeful sadism the movie exhibits towards its central character. The movie just constantly kicks this guy down and I’m supposed to find it funny? Nothing about his character warrants that kind of treatment lol. Am I supposed to root for an insecure guy going through a midlife crisis to have his hopes and dreams crushed and spit on? For his entire family to push him away? It’s laughable that the film expects me to laugh at the sheer amount of cruelty leveled at Paul and then simultaneously try to make me cry for him by playing some cheap shitty piano in the last scene. Manipulative filmmaking.

At the same time, sort of entertaining?

At the same time, I’m glad this movie exists? Feels like one of those old mid-budget movies that used to exist.

But really, I have to wonder. What is the point of this movie? Is it taking a stance on cancel culture? Is it saying anything substantive? Is it saying it in an interesting way? No, not really. The problem with a cancel culture allegory is that if you’re gonna try to make the case that cancelling is irrational you need to address it head on. Paul never actually DOES anything cancellable in the movie. Now, I get that that’s supposed to be funny, but in terms of commentary it falls flat. In real life, people get cancelled for shit that they do or say. If you want to argue that cancel culture is bad (which I, hot take, personally agree with) you need to engage with it as it actually exists. I just don’t believe that what happens in this movie would ever happen. My suspension of disbelief, already in tatters, is basically shat on by that stupid bit about people visiting each other’s dreams. Sorry but this shit was so corny man holy fuck lmaooooo.

The movie also ticks off another one of my pet peeves which is when filmmakers don’t understand how dreams work. None of the dreams here felt like dreams. Anybody who’s watched Inland Empire or Paprika or literally any movie made by somebody with an intuitive, emotional understanding of dreams will understand what I mean here. It’s the same problem Christopher Nolan encounters in Inception. I think Borgli is a good director, but he just does not understand dreams, at all.

The craziest thing is, pretty much everything about this movie should’ve landed with me. Nic Cage? Check. Borgli’s follow-up to Sick of Myself, one of my favorite movies? Check. A24 sci-fi/comedy/horror/bullshit? Check. DREAMS??? Check. THEMED AROUND ONE OF MY BIGGEST FEARS (BEING CANCELLED/HATED BY EVERYONE)??? CHECK.

THIS MOVIE HAD LITERALLY EVERYTHING GOING FOR IT AND IT STILL MANAGED TO FUCK IT UP.

Extra half-star for at least not being boring.

Another extra half-star for Nic Cage who fights tooth and nail against one of the most sociopathic scripts of the year (stiff competition actually). 3/10.

Killer’s Kiss - dir. Stanley Kubrick

Noir

Very boring. Some cool shots though. 2/10.

Zola - dir. Janicza Bravo

Black Comedy/Crime

Stylistically incredible. Dialogue? Hilarious. Plot? Ehhhhhhh. Zola is a fun character but by her very nature as a narrator she often feels secondary in her own story. Her being done with all the crazy shit around her was funny, but it made it hard to really get invested. Still, I think this is a dope movie that humanizes sex workers with a lot of visual flair. 6/10.

Only God Forgives - dir. Nicolas Winding Refn

Action/Crime

Justice by the end of the sword against those who seek to exploit. Or maybe just insane bloody neon vibes? I don’t entirely know. If you view this as a purely stylistic experience, then frankly I think this style kicks fucking ass and deserves way more praise than whatever cringey bullshit Edgar Wright cooks up film after film. Genuinely kind of baffled by the general response to this film but I guess it just makes sense. Everyone’s taste sucks but mine. RIP. 8/10.

The Killing - dir. Stanley Kubrick

Heist/Noir

Most evil wife and evil dog of all time? Probably yeah. I thought this was pretty solid. Very smooth plot that only suffers from feeling rushed. A lot of funny payoff. I also thought Sherry was a fantastically despicable character. First Kubrick film in my binge that I would say I like. 6/10.

Priscilla - dir. Sofia Coppola

Biopic/Coming-of-Age

Probably could’ve been a good twenty minutes shorter, if you cut out a the scenes that are basically just the same emotional/thematic concept wrung out over and over again. Yes, we get it, Priscilla and Elvis had some good times together. We don’t need seven trillion film grain montages to establish this.

That said, Priscilla Presley is a dope character, and Coppola uses her story to explore traditional gender roles in a way that actually felt fresh and exciting, at least to me. It’s not exactly subtle that Priscilla is like a toy to Elvis that he doesn’t respect as an autonomous being. He strings her along, kisses her and parades her when he needs the ego boost, and he does all of this without much pushback because, yeah, she’s a teenage girl who’s obsessed with him. The power dynamic here is just ridiculously lopsided. All relationships have power dynamics but this one is just so absurdly stacked in Elvis’ favor that it’s mind-boggling that grown-ass adults allowed it to happen.

At least we get a happy ending, with Priscilla coming into her own as a woman and breaking free from her one-sided love story. Tragically, though, I don’t think Priscilla ever really gets the individuality she probably sought. Even this biopic about her is entirely centered on her relationship with Elvis. I think it’s a solid movie but it’s sad that Priscilla Presley will always, to history, be the first wife of Elvis Presley. 6/10.

Pretty Village, Pretty Flame - dir. Srđan Dragojević

War

If I recall correctly, it was a close Serbian friend of mine who recommended me this movie. I am not an expert on Balkan history by any means but several of my close friends have been Slavs over the years. Hell, my girlfriend’s Russian. Through osmosis I’ve managed to absorb some knowledge on Balkan history.

Here we see the Bosnian War played out through the relationship between the Serb Milan, and his best friend, Halil, a Muslim Bosniak. The war puts a rift in their friendship that crushes them both to dust, and there are a number of perspectives on display between them, their comrades, and their superiors.

The overarching impression I got from watching this movie is that there’s a strong nostalgia for a unified Yugoslavian nation. Comrade Tito is worshipped almost like a Christlike figure. He’s like a superhero to the Serbs, a leader of a bygone era. Back in the good old days, when we could all just get along. It’s too bad those crazy Serbs/Croats/Bosniaks/Muslims/Macedonians/Kosovars make it imposssible, right?

Deja vu, man. Deja vu. 6/10.

Paths of Glory - dir. Stanley Kubrick

War

Art can pierce the hearts of even those most disheveled by the impact of war and military propaganda. The ending communicates this perfectly. Even if there are systems in place to direct us towards evil, the human spirit’s natural compassion wins out.

I would never have considered Kubrick a particularly warm filmmaker before diving into his filmography, but this movie really showed me his humanity. The desire to speak out against injustice shines here. Kirk Douglas is just terrific in this role, carrying all the gravitas in the world, culminating in a final outburst of idealistic rage.

A darkly current vein runs through a lot of the scenes involving the military higher-ups. They talk about the soldiers as cowardly subhuman rats while they attend dances, drink wine, and enjoy fine dining. Men are churned out into battle like guinea pigs and then are quite literally thrown out when they question or subvert their intended purpose.

A brilliant movie with a brilliant message that will never get old. 8/10.

Cobweb - dir. Samuel Bodin

Supernatural Horror

Very close race between this and Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes for funniest of the year. 2/10.

Days of Being Wild - dir. Wong Kar-wai

Romance/Drama

LMAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO positive reviews are projecting so hard. There’s nothing particularly deep or interesting being said here. At best the only value I can see someone deriving from this is some vibes and nothing more. Oh man dude’s a fuckboy because of mommy issues. Cool. Can we elaborate on that? Nah just vibes man turn your brain off and just vibe off man oh maaaaan the vibes man the VIBES.

There are probably student films out there with more substantive takes on emotional hollowness and mommy issues. This is not it man.

Also, the green tint is just disgusting to look at. 4/10.

American Fiction - dir. Cord Jefferson

Satire/Drama

Guilty white people are gonna fuck heavy with this one.

Jokes aside, it’s pretty decent. It has no visual identity or cinematic presence, which left me disappointed, but as a comedy it works well. The social satire is on point, if often cliche. The scene with the pink haired SJW in the beginning as an example of such cliche.

Jeffrey Wright is obviously very good here but you didn’t need me to tell you that.

The family drama is another thing that left me sort of disappointed. Someone I follow (hey Jenny) called the movie a character study, and while I can understand that perspective, I just wasn’t feeling it. The gay brother, the mom with dementia, the cheating dead dad, the wedding, it just all felt so uninteresting to me. I thought we’d get a lot more focus on Monk’s work on his novels and more satire of the publishing industry as a whole. Those were easily the funniest, smartest, most interesting parts of the movie. The main issue with the non-writer stuff is that it’s largely bland. There’s not enough focus on each personal situation, and not enough work done to tie it into the movie’s central thesis. 6/10.

Apocalypse Now - dir. Francis Ford Coppola

War

Sometimes it’s easier to live in Hell than it is to come back to humanity. Sometimes it makes more sense to forgo sanity for bloodthirst.

Sometimes you have to kill God to escape Hell. 8/10.

BlacKkKlansman - dir. Spike Lee

Crime/Biographical

I like Flip’s character, obviously. A Jew wrestling with his racial identity is always gonna hit home for me. But the movie isn’t really focused on that and that’s fine, the movie’s supposed to be a political anthem for the Trump era, and it works in that sense. The ending drops the ball, though, featuring newsreel footage that beats you over the head with the message. I get it, I don’t need to be spoon-fed. Still, I liked this. 6/10.

Rye Lane - dir. Raine Allen-Miller

RomCom

It’s cute! 6/10.

Lolita - dir. Stanley Kubrick

Black Comedy/Psychological Drama

Few times have I wanted to deck a main character in the mouth more than watching Lolita.

Very sad movie but the ending is too goofy for me to take seriously.

The craziest thing about it is that most women in old movies legit act like Lolita. All Nabokov did was take gender expectations and make them literal. The fact that Lolita was sexualized after the fact just goes to show that women are expected to behave and look like teenagers.

The first act is nuts too. Humbert Humbert is the worst guy ever man. Just awful. I felt so bad for Charlotte. Her dying in a car accident felt a little too convenient for the plot though. My theory is that Humbert killed her but since he’s an unreliable narrator he spins it to be an accident instead.

Diabolical stuff. 7/10.

Water Lilies - dir. Céline Sciamma

Coming-of-Age/Romance

Flat script, flat performances, and on top of that does nothing new with the coming-of-age/sexual awakening cliche. This is like a parody of French art house cinema. I refuse to believe any teenagers would behave this way. I don’t care how gay and French they are. 3/10.

2001: A Space Odyssey - dir. Stanley Kubrick

Sci-Fi/Epic

Call me an optimist but I think Stanley Kubrick was trying to say something beautiful, not catastrophic.

The fate of humanity is that of expansion, exploration, and rebirth.

We will conquer our earthly vices and ascend to the heavens. But all in due time. All in due time. We fear that which we do not understand, and this holds us back from our destiny amongst the stars.

We are not so far removed from our ape ancestors. We are beings of flesh and blood.

Change is terrifying, but magnificent.

I am an ape and I would like to go home now. 8/10.

Timecrimes - dir. Nacho Vigalondo

Talk about a winner of a third act.

Was going to give this a 6/10 or 7/10 at most until maybe the last 15-20 minutes. I’ve seen a few time travel thrillers and I thought I’d pretty much called this movie from the jump.

That final twist hit and I audibly gasped. Wow. Just insane.

You could make a pretty good argument that this is a movie about appreciating your wife or something but really it’s just a banger script about time travel. Not a whole lot else to it.

Recommending this to my dad ASAP. 8/10.

Halloween - dir. Rob Zombie

Really wanted to like this because Rob Zombie seems like an interesting director but alas this is a very dumb movie with a vision that pretty much peters into a tailspin as soon as Myers breaks out of the mental institution.

Interesting conversations could be had about nurture vs nature, and we get a pretty callous backstory for Myers that actually nails the brutality I’d hope for in a slasher. It’s also just chilling watching a kid give into his psychopathy, far more than watching a big dumb brute go around killing random people for no discernible reason.

Basically, you’ve got a decent first half and a by-the-numbers second half, that has nothing of value to say. 3/10.

Spartacus - dir. Stanley Kubrick

Way too corny, way too long. Drops the ball after the intermission. Technically impressive or whatever but I don’t care. Boring! 5/10.