I was pretty excited to see Edgar Wright taking this on. His mood is very fitting here. You can’t stay campy if you’re doing the book, but you can’t go fully dark, as the book does, with a retelling like this. He landed it right in the middle, with a cogent point that is formed alongside comedy and actual fun adventure.

Big love to this movie. It was a ton of fun and I loved the much bigger scale of the world set up here. The players all worked for me, and the story was a ride. This will earn occasional rewatches in my house.

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The story is bonkers. A shootout starts on a side street in Hong Kong. That shootout essentially extends into an apartment building in a different part of the city, resulting in a standoff. There are automatic weapons, a fucking bomb gets tossed, cars all over the place have bullet holes and broken windows, and like, one guy was hit in the leg.

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Criterion Challenge selection for the topic, “Watch a film that would be your first choice in the Criterion Closet.”

Why. I think the cover just fascinated me. It looked like something in the same vein as other silent movies I’d seen from the era. A creepyish cover with a title like that made me think Haxan, or maybe some of the more overt horror movies. Heck yeah. It really isn’t that.

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This movie absolutely rules. It shows the brutal incompetence of a fascist regime. It does not pussyfoot around the issue. It shows the fascists beating people in the streets, rounding up people with the wrong thoughts, upturning people’s lives because they can. All of that. Then, the movie shows us how to deal with that. Read the rest...

This was a Letterboxd Roulette recommendation as well as one of my Criterion Challenge movies for the year. It was a good pick n both accounts.

Normally, I try to have something interesting to say about these, but all that happened when I finished this was me saying, “That was wonderful” to Christy and smiling. I loved this movie.

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A Letterboxd Roulette recommendation, this time from Ty McGowen, who also hosts a podcast I will have to check out.

I’m not very versed in Jim Jarmusch, but everyone I’ve ever heard talk about him makes a point to say that he’s a bit of an acquired taste or might put people off somehow (paraphrasing, all of it). The one I’d seen from him was Night on Earth, which is an anthology and stars Winona Ryder (put her in a movie, I’ll check it out) so it may not be entirely indicative of what to expect from him.

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Godland’s cover on both the Criterion website and Criterion Channel listings has been staring at me for a long time. That image has been seared in for a while and I have wanted to watch since I first saw it. This movie, as many do, scared me. It looked like I needed a lot of time and energy to make sure I watched it correctly. I think that was both the right read, and a bit incorrect. This did take energy, and it was a bit long. However, it was impossible not to be completely drawn in by the beauty. It’s indescribable, really. Iceland is magnificent.

I watched over two days, and that might have been a mistake. I think I missed some key interactions that would explain Lucas’s relationship with Ragnar, and the ultimate demise of Ragnar for a seemingly mild transgression — or at least a transgression that escalated very, very quickly.

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I have been on a mini run of “you gotta hand it to him” with regard to Kevin Costner. That run led me to dive with reckless abandon into Waterworld, a movie that I was ready to believe was treated unfairly over the years. It has not been treated unfairly. This wasn’t good.

The movie has a decent enough idea and a not-awful plot line. The premise is not subtle (the intro voiceover describes the melting of the polar icecaps, creating a world without land), but that unsubtlety to start the movie can be seen as world-building. It’s quickly just part of the movies, with a minor line here or there to remind you that the people alive today at least abstractly understand that their ancestors had really fucked up.

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I had a tough time with this one. I feel like the evidence is mounting that I just am not a huge fan of the visual style of this type of movie. What I mean is the movie that shows you gritty, 70s New York or some other American city. I don’t really appreciate the camera work of the intimate close ups, I dislike the amount of contrasty darkness that obscures what I can see. And I think I dislike the “real people” genre when it’s a couple of mugs who are just shitty in their existence. Read the rest...

I suspect this was made for me and my generation. I didn’t care or it, or even get it, really. I have a major gap in my movie watching that’s about ten years long, from 1995-2005. I had little kids at that time, so many of the movies that helped shape the young adults of my I missed. This, and probably a lot of the things that inspired it, were movies that never really made it into my life. They weren’t the easy to spot ones at the video store, and I didn’t have time for that. Read the rest...