[Awards] Movies That I Saw in 2024

To go along with my 2024 Game of the Year post, I'll now tell you about the movies I saw in 2024 as well!

I can't really call it a "movie of the year" post if I haven't actually seen many new movies lol, I think it was like 3.

So instead, I'll just tell you about what movies I saw this year instead. I watched quite a few! From great stuff to awful stuff, artsy to fartsy, horror and romantic drama, I've seen a bunch of stuff. So let's get to it!

 

On the 2nd of January, I watched Hayao Miyazaki's first feature film, Lupin III: The Castle of Gagliostro. It was OKAY! I dunno, I think I liked the first half more than the second, there were a lot of Miyazaki-isms in it that I enjoyed, and it was a good enough time, but I think I liked the last Lupin III movie I saw, Legend of the Gold of Babylon, more than this one. Still I enjoyed this take on Lupin and the plot, and a lot of the directing, it was a nice little movie to watch for sure.

But this then made me want to rewatch all of Miyazaki's other feature films. I was gonna watch The Boy and the Heron but it wasn't out on home video yet by the time I was done. I totally need to get around to that soon. 

Instead of going on about all of them in detail I'll try to sum up my thoughts one by one real quick:

Princess Mononoke: Excellent film, I don't care it's the most popular and acclaimed one at least before like Wind Rises and Boy and the Heron at least, yeah it's the most boring one to have as your favorite so no one does except for ME. I think it's incredibly well directed and animated, thought provoking, beautiful looking with a wonderful music score that really heightens the experience and sells the "both sides" story really well. Which yeah, it's way more about the nature and cycle of armed conflicts than "nature good humans bad" or something, nature and humans are shown to be both capable of great stupidity and cruelty and both need to abandon their hatred lest it destroy them both, symbolized by the "curse" protagonist Ashitaka gets from the vengeful spirit of a boar who died in the conflict. Also, the real message is "Don't trust the feds they will exploit your conflict for their own gain and really, you should think about what you're doing if the feds are coming in and exploiting you.", in the form of a guy sent by the emperor to get these idiots to get him the head of a supposed god. Really, really good movie. 

 

Spirited Away: Not as good of a movie, still good but I feel like too much of it just meanders around with nothing happening, I don't mean no plot advancement I don't care I just feel like it didn't really do anything with several scenes that wasn't done in other places. The resolution takes place during the falling action like 20 or more minutes after the climax, and it's a big convenient let down, like Chihiro just rides the train to grandma's house, she says lol that whole shit with Haku being enslaved by Yubaba is actually already taken care of, go back and get your parents. So she does, very easily, and I know that it's thematic like she's gained wisdom and grown up from this so she can tell at a glance none of the pigs are her transformed parents but it's such a limp resolution, just unsatisfying. But it's still gorgeously animated and directed so even when we're just watching some ideas someone had that didn't really mesh with the story play out it looks good at least. Good movie, but overrated. This is the second most boring to pick as your favorite but a lot of people actually do this time.

 

Howl's Moving Castle: This one also meanders around and has a weak climax, but I forgive it because it's a character driven slice of life story in a fantasy world more than anything. It doesn't care about the plot, so much so there's a plot going on in the background of the story, an entire war happens and we only see snippets of it, because what's important are the characters and the romance. Spirited Away didn't care about the plot but also felt too plot driven not to, in some ways it's a character driven slice of life story but in others it's not, so it doesn't work out as well and the characters aren't as developed as they are here. I really enjoyed them, and the romance between Howl and Sophie. This feels like high fantasy whimsical shoujo anime what with Howl being this handsome devil of a man but secretly a huge manchild who needs Sophie to step in and clean his house up for him, and he's got a dark and mysterious past to learn about. Meanwhile Sophie totally feels like a shoujo protagonist, she's strong willed and brave while still being feminine so that the average woman could still relate to and/or self-insert with her. Except for the whole "old lady curse" but that ties into something I liked, despite that she spends half the film-post curse looking much younger because the curse works based on her own mindset, the more confident she is and the more she takes charge the more she forgets about the curse and the younger she looks. It's a curse that causes and preys upon insecurity, if she feels weak and frail her appearance matches it, and this strong will eventually makes the curse meaningless. If I recall, she never gets it lifted, because she doesn't need to. Even if she becomes an old lady sometimes, Howl still fell for her because of her personality. You can tell this is a story based on a book written by a woman lol. But seriously, I think there's depth there, and forgetting that I just enjoyed spending time with fun characters. Great movie!

Ponyo: Ponyo sucks. Literally nothing happens. It's all just flashy animation that conveys no story, we fuck around forever doing nothing just endless scenes of Ponyo fucking around and causing the end of days because she was a careless little toddler and then sometimes there are scenes where Hayao Miyazaki doesn't even try to get you to buy that her and this other toddler are in love and then at the end them being in love saves the world from the moon which is now randomly going to crash into the earth "because." Miyazaki was clearly tired of making these kids movies and phoned it in, just tossing in all the stuff he's known for and practically self-parodying himself because he didn't care about that shit anymore. Like yeah whatever, these kids are in love and it saves the day, that's what I'm known for right? You'll eat up anything I do as long as there's pretty animation, right? And he was right, they did. But I didn't, this movie sucks.

Kiki's Delivery Service: But Kiki's Delivery Service does not suck and in fact it's really good. This is another slice of life character driven story that doesn't really focus on a plot, there's barely one and that's okay. And the characters are really good, and fun. It's nothing complicated, it's just the rise of Kiki as she becomes the best delivery girl in town due to her ability to fly on her broom and also her having a budding little romance with this dork boy who loves planes and shit. It's a fun movie and that's about as much as you need to say, it has it's themes and little character arcs but the appeal is just that you're having fun with cute and fun characters who run around this cool and cozy little town and stuff. It's "wholesome" as they say, even if it's more evidence that Hayao Miyazaki is a lolicon because there's a few instances of seeing up Kiki's skirt at her underwear and one scene where she's just sitting in her underwear if I recall. But also I think she's wearing bloomers, the european kind not the gym clothes kind, if I also recall. Still, kinda suspicious. You ever notice how many of his movies are about little girl protagonists???

Porco Rosso: And then we have his author-insert story where the author-insert is a cool fat pig man plane pilot who shoots down lots of guys. This is another one where the curse doesn't get lifted, but that's because Porco is flat out Miyazaki's avatar character. He depicts himself as a pig often. This is Miyazaki fantasizing about being a cool italian pilot during the cool era of WWII, so sadly not the coolest era for italians. Luckily, this is a heavily romantic, in the original sense of the word, film, so it's okay if the world's in bad shape. It's about romanticizing the idea of a cool renegade pilot who's free from Musolini's grasp and flies free in the skies, doing the jobs he wants to do for meager pay. His life's kinda shitty, but in the cool and romantic way where he's like super free and living a rough man's life. I sound like I'm making fun of it but I mean it, it's genuinely really cool and Porco Rosso is a genuinely really cool character. He's a picaro who fights sky pirates and goes on adventures and that's just kinda what the film is. It's a character study about a really interesting character who goes to some really interesting places and has some interesting fights. The climax of the movie is him having a boxing match in the water with a sky pirate and it's so fuckin' cool and fun and funny. I can't describe what happens in this movie because I don't really remember the plot, again another character driven story but not so slice-of-life this time in a sense. It's just a fun, cool, and romantic time, I love it. Great movie.

The Wind Rises: Mediocre and boring. Sorry I just am not interested. I don't care if this is like a pro-Japan in WWII movie, even if it's wildly hypocritical for Miyazaki of all people to try and defend Japan even if it's the lightest defense imaginable with it being like "Yeah man we did horrible things but like, some guys just wanted to build planes and stuff man." We know he's a military otaku so it makes sense he'd be interested in this time period, hence Porco Rosso, and especially the guy who made the Zero. But the thing is, this is too biographical of a work. It tries, in vain, to spice things up from time to time with like the weird dream sequences and sound effects being done a capella, but it's boring. Biographies aren't boring on their own they can be interesting if the person's life is interesting and this guy's kinda is, but it's done in such a boring way. I guess it was done for reverence for the guy, don't wanna get too out there with his characterization we want this down to earth and realistic to the kind of person he was. Well the problem is the average Japanese person isn't very interesting, he's a very unenthusiastic character despite having some kind of super autism where he can see his designs coming to life in his head and figure out exactly what would go wrong with one so he can fix it before they even build the thing. He's just not interesting beyond that, even that is done in such a blase way it doesn't grab me. He has a romance with a woman who tragically dies and I just go "Oh that sucks." and move on. It became uninteresting due to a desire to remain grounded and historically accurate and it takes that too far. Maybe it's also overcorrection from getting tired of doing whimsical fantasy stories for so long, he just wanted to do the opposite, but it ends up being a snore. I've seen movies like this before and have enjoyed them, but this one had me hoping it'd be over soon. 

My Neighbor Totoro: Not much to say here, this used to be one of my favorites, and it is quite fun, but that's really about it. I liked the story with their mother being sick and everything it was sad and I was happy when she improved and everything from the Totoro magic they did, but yeah it's very simple. This is short, being 80 minutes long, and is just a collection of fun little whimsical events involving the, again, little girls and the Totoro and various other, uh, youkai? I guess? It's extra slice of life this time but not very character driven, the characters are fine for what they need to do here and they are charming and cute, but that's all. It's a good movie, it's just 80 minutes of cute fun with magic critters. They kinda contrive the whole oh no, one of the girls is missing thing so that there would be a conflict at the end, which shows you how much this is just a collection of fun stuff. But it is fun! So there you go! Good enough movie.

Nausica And the Valley of the Wind: I liked this more than the first second time I saw this(the first being on TV in the 2000s I believe), which I think was just because I went into it with too high expectations what with everyone always talking about how great it is. I think it's really cool, like it's got this fun anachronistic tech level where we got planes and tanks but also knights. I really love that kinda shit. The ohmu are cool, all the notorious scenes are cool, it's a good story it's well directed and the characters are good. Nausica is a good protagonist and she embodies the themes and values that Miyazaki wanted to convey. But yeah it's just not amazing, it's just good. It was a good movie. I don't have much more to say, it's a cool story with a simple plot that conveys its themes well and looks good, it just doesn't do it for me much more than that. Maybe it's just cuz this is only like, part 1 of a longer story to my knowledge. I'd like to read the manga sometime and get the full story. Good movie. Also, Hideaki Anno did a good job on the decayed God Warrior, it looked really cool.

Castle in the Sky: My second favorite, I can see why this was such a formative and important film for Japanese kids in the 80s. Great directing an animation, really good music, simple but fun characters, an exciting plot, a unique and beautiful world with good worldbuilding(a bunch of it done right in the opening credits), some great melancholic moods once you get to Laputa, some interesting callbacks to Nausica that I noticed since I watched one after the other, great mechanical designs just like Nausica but the one that takes the cake is the Heavenly Trooper robot from Laputa. This movie looks cool, it's really exciting, it's really well directed with some great scenes and a lot of great music, and it's just a really good one of these kinds of movies. The climax is so exciting with everyone coming together and the place falling apart and shit, it's just such a cool time. Got some nice themes about hubris and greed I mean, the whole fall of the great empire of these sky cities shows that and there's also the military who end up screwed because of their lust for the power of Laputa. The only bad thing about it is that I think the bad guy coulda been done better, I've already forgotten his name again, he's just not an interesting character, just a greedy jerk who wants the thing he says is his birthright and that's all you don't learn much about him. But other than that, I love it. Fantastic film.

I said I didn't wanna go into too much detail but I went into more than I wanted to. Oh well.

 

In between that and the Lupin III movie, I actually watched War for the Planet of the Apes, the only one of the reboot series I hadn't seen, until I think another one came out. It was okay, like the previous one. I really don't understand why some people think they're so good? They're fine, but nothing beyond that. I really don't have anything to say about them, they're just very basically written, basically directed Hollywood movies. Not the typical Hollywood slop we've been fed since they started, so maybe that's why people are impressed by them, but they're just not doing much for me.

Then, after that, I went to go see Dune: Part Two in the theater. I don't have a ton to say, it's just a another well directed adaptation of this time the second half of the first Dune book. I think Dennis Villeneuve said he wanted to adapt one of the other Dune books so that'd be cool. I have never read the book so no idea how this or Lynch's version stack up to them, but I like the movies. I think this was a pretty well written, visually interesting, and exciting film. It's not more dark than Lynch's version, his was just so surreal it doesn't fully register how dark it is unless you think about it, but here you get how dark and shitty this setting is. It's a really good movie even if I don't have a ton to say, I would recommend it if you like sci-fi action movies as it's a very good one of them, and character studies of less than good role model characters as Paul Atreides is definitely an interestingly flawed character who really, really should not be the chosen one. He's portrayed very differently than in Lynch's version which portrays him far more hero-like, though to be fair this was before becoming God Emperor and doing all sorts of genocides and all, so this one just foreshadows that he's really not going to be the best leader a bit more. But also, the guy he killed and took the place of was also really shitty so ehhh, you know, is it any worse than what would have happened? At least we know this guy. I liked this a lot, but I think I did enjoy Lynch's version more.

So I watched David Lynch's Dune when I got home. Lynch was, sadly, not fond of this one and really regretted working on it. I was unable to convince him otherwise before he passed, which is surely the worse thing about that. I love this movie, it's great! Yeah it's a cool sci-fi tale told in such a surreal way with so many great visuals and shots and effects. Dennis V. might be a very visual director but Lynch is still the better director, this is probably his coolest looking movie though again, I haven't seen all of them. But I've since seen Mulholland drive and still nope. He really should have done more stuff that wasn't relatively grounded, taking place in worlds that aren't our own. Obviously surrealism lends itself better to that sort of place, but maybe that's why he didn't; it's more disorienting and dream-like to do that with mundane locations than alien sci-fi worlds. Still, it would have been cool. Lynch with a big budget and free reign to show off creative designs you couldn't put in even the weirdest of his films/3rd season of Twin Peaks is great, and I would have loved to see it again. It's great despite how truncated this is to fit in a 2hr 17m movie. I like all the odd whisper narration explaining things it doesn't have time to convey to you without just spelling it out, or catching you up on things you need to know because we don't have time for a whole expository scene. I think that adds to it. I still understood the story, everyone's motivations and goals, the worldbuilding, the stakes, everything I needed to care about what was happening. This isn't that surreal, it's actually a pretty straightforward story just told in a very rushed and sometimes "off" way. But it looks cool and the story's still good, I dunno why Lynch was so ashamed of this one. 

I rewatched several other films like Silence of the Lambs, Labyrinth, Dark City, A Cure for Wellness, and Cure. I'll just say I recommend all of them. You know what Silence of the Lambs and Labyrinth are and if you haven't seen them, you really should. Dark City is a very interesting film and everything is a spoiler aside saying it's a neo-noir thriller of a type, go in blind and watch the director's cut which is luckily the easiest to get a hold of now. The theatrical cut takes off about 10 minutes of scenes which are good, color corrects it differently and worse, rearranges some scenes in a way that makes things worse, and adds shitty narration to the start that spoils fucking everything because the studio were worried people might get confused by this mystery story where you are meant to be confused as things slowly make more and more sense. A Cure for Wellness is directed by Gore Verbinski, the guy who directed Rango, The Ring, and Mouse Hunt. Guy's got some, very wide range. It's another thriller about a young business man sent to a remote wellness center in Switzerland to retrieve their CEO who is staying there as they need him back to go through with a merger so their company doesn't go under. Things do not go well from there, in fact they go as well as you'd expect from hearing it's a thriller, they do not want him or the CEO to leave and the gaslighting begins quite shortly. It's good for a "lines between reality and falsehood blurring" as you too start to question whether or not they're lying to him. It's a well directed and good looking movie to boot, check it out. Cure is a mystery horror thriller similar to like Se7en or something directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, best known for Pulse and Sweet Home, but I like this one a lot more than Pulse. It's really atmospheric with some hypnotic scenes and makes you feel much like the victims of this strange man who hypnotizes people into killing their own family, and the detective looking into it's mind starts to deteriorate as well. It's great and I don't wanna tell you too much about it, one of my favorite horror films. 

As for a new movie, after Mutsumi Inomata sadly passed away, I watched Genmu Senki Leda, one of the original Isekais. I really, really do not have much to say about it, because it's not much of a story. It's an 1h 10m long and it's a very simple plot with even simpler characters, what this has going for it is it's visuals, art style, and character design which are all great. These are the most Mutsumi Inomata character designs that have ever Mutsumi Inomata'd. If you're not aware of who she is, she's one of two character designers for the Tales series next to Kousuke Fujishima(famous for You're Under Arrest and Ah! My Goddess), aside from those two times they got someone else shhhhh. In addition, she did a ton of different character designs for various anime, mostly OVAs from the 80s to my knowledge, including this one. It's the most "good looking 80s OVA" looking 80s OVA, the quintessential one. Unfortunately outside of that there's not much going on, not even in a "oh it's using visuals to convey ideas and a mood and not really 'telling a story' in a traditional sense" way like something like Angel's Egg(which I still haven't seen), it's just very bare bones. The characters are charming enough the plot is a simple "Yohko's got the thing bad guys want it oh NO!" sort of thing and they beat the bad guy at the end who wanted power cuz he was bad or something. I like that Yohko's whole goal is to get back home so she can give this recording of her playing a piano piece she composed to the guy she likes, not only is it cool she composed him a whole piano piece that expressed her feelings for him it's just such a sweet little goal for her to have. Can't die in this alien world to laser beams before I tell the guy I like how I feel! That's the most interesting the characters ever get, but she's cute, her outfit is the sexy, and she's likeable so I was happy to see her succeed. That's all, it's alright.

 

I also rewatched the Ace Attorney live action movie by Takashi Miike and it's, well it's weird. I'd recommend it if you haven't seen it, it's what you'd expect from "Takashi Miike directed an Ace Attorney adaptation." except less gory. Kind of a shame we couldn't get adaptations of the other 2 from the original trilogy out of him, that would have been fun.

 

Saw The Princess Bride again and if you don't know what that is, go find out right now. 

Then, finally saw Pulse, by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. I mentioned him a little bit ago. I like it, it's a good movie, but it's just not that good. A lot of people really like it and like to talk about it's themes of trepidation and anxiety at the growing technological advancements of the internet and in general at the time, and it's got that, but it just didn't do it for me. I tend to enjoy stuff like that from around the turn of the millennium even if I know everyone was off by a couple decades for when it would actually be a problem, so maybe it's just that I saw the much better Cure that this feels less good by comparison. It's still good, though, full of the same kind of slow moody direction to the horror from that film as well as the same style of buildup to the mystery. I think the end with like, the world actually ending and stuff is kinda lame though, I feel like there was a bad CG plane crash in there? I just found it less interesting but there are some pretty spooky scenes and yeah, thematically it's very interesting and still relevant today. Something about how being connected digitally actually makes people more lonely than ever, which yeah. Very basic reading because it's been a while since I saw it but that's what I remember. Still pretty good, you should check it out.

After that, I saw One Piece Film: Red. Now, why did I, a not-One Piece fan, watch a One Piece movie? Well for one, I actually wanna watch several of them, because some of them are directed by notable anime directors. This is one of those, with it being done by Goro Taniguchi, director/creator of such anime series as S-Cry-Ed, Code Geass, and my favorite of these 3, GunXSword. If you haven't seen GunXSword, you need to see GunXSword. It's amazing. But now I'm talking about Film Red, which is great also. I had no idea what I was getting into but I was pleasantly surprised. I don't wanna give away what the gimmick is but it's really fun, leads to some crazy and incredible visuals even if they're 3DCG which I hate in my anime BLEH. It actually looks cool here because it's accompanied by fantastic cinematography. Lots of that in this film, all the time, sequences of crazy and inventive visuals and just really great looking art. The story this is all in service to is a good one as well, this story's antagonist is fantastic, one of those ones who's doing something really horrible because they've become broken by some harsh and horrible facet of the world and believe what they're doing is what's best for everyone. In fact, they believe that in a way, they're doing what the people wanted. The film goes into great detail for why they're doing this and how they're able to, creating a rather sympathetic character despite the goal. It's the kind of thing I'm really into, that some people actually really hate lol. Apparently, this antagonist is kind of controversial and hated by a lot of people, even if it's established they were under a drug induced psychosis for most of the runtime. In the end, Luffy has to punch some sense into them and they have a little redemption, the ending is absolutely fantastic and a great capstone to everything that happened, and that gimmick I mentioned really elevates the story as well. I loved it. Maybe if I was a One Piece fan I'd actually hate this like a lot of people do, but I'm not. Purely going into this as someone who watched the first, like, 100 episodes when it was on Toonami or something and then was done, taken as it's own thing I think it's great. Do recommend even if you don't like One Piece.

I saw Hunter X Hunter: The Last Mission a day later and it waaaaaas shit. Hunter X Hunter: Phantom Rouge felt like a lousy fanfiction and bored me, even though it was about the best character, Kurapika. Last Mission isn't even fanfiction, that would be more interesting. This isn't even a filler episode/episodes, this is a Hunter X Hunter themed generic movie plot. This is like most movies based on anime series, which Film Red feels like much more than, except done exceedingly worse. None of the characters are right, none of the action is right, the plot is boring and the antagonist is generic, it's just nothing like the series was and even Phantom Rouge managed to feel more like it. I can't imagine anyone enjoying this even if you were just really desperate to see your favorite characters again. It sucks ass.

But then, another day later, I saw Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms. And it's a fantastic movie. The ending made me cry, it was so good. I actually called my mom after it to tell her how much I appreciate everything she's done for me and that I love her. That's what this is about, motherhood and it's difficulties. It's a fantasy drama about, well, basically an elf but they don't call them that, named Maquia, who's village gets attacked by a bad guy and she ends up fleeing but then taking care of a human child who she finds while on the run who's family has been killed by bandits I believe. The movie chronicles both her struggles with being a single mother despite starting when she's still a child herself, the growing war related to those bad guys I mentioned, her son eventually getting drafted in that war, other people becoming mothers, tension between Maquia and her friend who ended up in captivity of the king, just all sorts of shit. For being only 2 hours it's very ambitious and manages to pack in tons of world building and a pretty expansive plot while still keeping mostly to the mother-son relationship over the years. This is one of it's problems, it maybe does try to shove too much into the story even if it handles a lot of it well, there are a lot of events and characters that are under built up and developed, and while I still think they were effective enough it would have been a lot better to have had that fleshing out. It ends up able to happen due to the second, bigger issue, which is that it encapsulates all the best and worse things about it's Writer/Director, Mari Okada's, writing. We can make all this stuff happen because of contrivances, mostly characters acting completely irrationally. In a way that kinda makes sense and clearly feels like part of the point, but is still too convenient and was definitely just so we could move the plot forward without building to it more naturally. Hey a person could do this, so they will. Which ties into the fact everyone always makes whatever the most dramatic decision would be at any given time, only the most dramatic thing that could possible happen will happen each and every time. This is the problem people have with Mari Okada's very melodramatic writing, no matter how many alternate choices you can see not just a person but this specific character making, they will always act in the most emotional and dramatic way possible even if you might think they're more likely to not. Because that's what she wants, she wants that super heightened emotion, that drama, that human irrationality leading to great tragedy as well as great triumph. This movie is absolutely, a melodramtic tear jerker. If you don't want that, you'll hate it. I, personally, think it's a really damn good one. The thing that stops this from being 10/10 is the underdeveloped stuff and the fact that sometimes it can get grating seeing characters act so stupid and emotional fucking things up again for the drama and even the themes, there was a certain scene involving delivering a baby where I remember being exasperated wanting someone to go get a real midwife or a doctor or something and thinking about how it sure is dramatically convenient she's having the baby right at this moment. But speaking of moments, there's so many poignant and sad ones throughout, it really is a great story about motherhood and about a character who doesn't age while everyone around her gets old and dies, broken friendships, the desire to fight for something you believe in, needing to let your child go when it's time for them to leave, all sorts of interesting things like that. It's Mari Okada's directorial debut and it's a good one, even better than her first series, Oh Maidens in Your Savage Season, which is actually significantly less melodramatic and contrived for drama, though the end still has some of those problems. I'd recommend both and especially this one if you can get past how dramatic everyone acts at all opportunities. I think Okada is slowly improving on that front over time, hence why the show I mentioned has so much less of that issue. Her work can be hit and miss but she's getting a lot better and the last few projects she's done have been good, so I'd check them out. Especially this one.

A bit over a week later, I watch Gone With the Wind, the 1939 film adaptation of the novel of the same name, for the first time, and man was as it good. Yeah yeah it's sympathetic to the south or whatever, the notion that the south was evil and bad and the north was good and righteous is the victor's propaganda. This film show's the south's side of it and still makes it clear hey, they were being pretty shitty, it's just that the north was being pretty shitty too. You can see how they'd feel even more justified when their enemy is coming in here and mercilessly killing their fellow countryman. We can't pretend that the north was the good guys who cared about the poor black people the reality was far more political and less pure than that, so it's fine to show their side and be somewhat sympathetic to it. If "yeah a lot of innocent people were killed and they forever lost their prosperity and also, a bunch of exploitative assholes moved in when the war was done to make money" is too sympathetic for you, I dunno what to tell you. Enjoy living in your pretend "the good guy always beats the bad guy" world, I guess. You can admit that and also think it was for the best overall. Anyway, it doesn't really matter, because the story's about a shitty plantation owner anyway. Not even really shitty because she treated her slaves bad, she actually treated them pretty well, she's just an awful person. And that's what I enjoyed about this movie. Speaking of romanticism again, this is both a character study of a pretty shitty person who ends up ruining the life she built by being so cutthroat and ambitious, becoming the kind of person who can't maintain the quiet affluent life she'd worked so hard to create for her due to the very nature she needed to get there. But it's also very romantic in it's depiction of that while still making it clear she fucks herself over in the end, in addition to being romantic in the relationship sense with her eventually marrying Rhett Butler. This romanticism is exemplified by the gorgeously directed and famous scene where protagonist Scarlett O'Hara says "As god as my witness, I'll never go hungry again!" That right there is it, that's the character. She says, after the war has taken almost everything from her, that even if she has to lie, cheat, and steal, she will never go hungry again. And she doesn't, she fights as underhandedly as she has to and goes from sucking because she's a brat to sucking because she lies, cheats, and steals. But there's something you can root for in her, she sucks as a person but as a character has a lot of depth and is very interesting to watch. She's working hard to make sure she and her kin are prosperous and she doesn't care who she has to step on in the process, and seeing what she went through you can't help but agree and want to see her succeed in that. It's that kind of story, I love that kind of character study of an unscrupulous character. It's also of course a romantic drama and I think Rhett Butler, her swarthy, smarmy love interest is an equally interesting and unscrupulous character. Their relationship is developed across the whole film and is built up naturally so you properly get the feeling there really is something between them as well as the clear personal gain motive for marrying each other. This film is about 4 hours long and like Lawrence of Arabia, does and does not feel that long at the same time. It's long and encompasses such a long amount of time, it's a really ambitious story and ambitious film for how many chapters and little story arcs it covers, definitely something based on a novel. I really enjoyed that, it helped with making it feel long and not-long at the same time, because you were always getting a different stage of the protagonist's life as you follow it, each one not going on for too long, while it having so many makes it feel like such an big and complete story. It's like a really good JRPG, it's 30-60 hours and that's why you feel fully satisfied, there's really no story left to tell by the end. And I mentioned the cinematography, it's absolutely fantastic. I had thought, due to it being in color, that it was from the 60s the whole time. Then I found out it was from 1939! I dunno why people act like Citizen Kane from 2 years later is so impressive, I was much more impressed with the techniques on display here, and it even does a better job at going over a person's life and their downfall and transformation into a shitlord without cutting out all the chunks that tell you why they became that way. Seriously though, the cinematography was impressive by modern standards, and when I say modern I don't mean within the last 20 years. There's some shit that puts good looking movies I've seen to shame, especially knowing they did it in the late 30s. Damn! I was originally gonna take a point off for something I felt was really contrived and sped through near the end, but that was because I thought it was from the 60s and they should have learned to do this kind of thing better by then but well, I was actually about 20 years off. It's extremely impressive for it's time, I would absolutely recommend it if you can work up the nerve to sit down and watch it for 4 hours. 

A bit after that I watched the HeartCatch PreCure movie, and it was good! It had the fun characters, the artstyle, and the action scenes I like from the show. It's, like with the previous two anime movies I mentioned, just an extended episode/squished down arc. It's one of those. There's a new bad guy to fight and we're battling in Paris! If I recall, this bad guy had a sad backstory that's tied with a new character that the girls have to cheer up named Oliver, and eventually the two of them also fight each other and it was pretty cool and dramatic. I don't remember too much about it, there were some really nicely animated moments and it looks cool. The bad guy's got a cool character design. It's just you know, more HeartCatch. I would say check it out if you liked HeartCatch. If you haven't seen it, I'd also recommend it. It is indeed a little girl's cartoon, unlike even the magical girl anime made directly for otaku, but it has a lot that makes it stand out artistically and the characters are really fun and have good arcs. They sadly had to cut out a lot of the actual, you know, story they wanted to tell in favor of Toei's patented "Fucking around for like like 10-15 episodes at a time where we battle a monster of the week and don't develop the plot, characters, or themes." technique but it's still a very good show.

I also watched Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection for the first time, after I rewatched Alien(in the theater because it got re-released for the anniversary!) and Aliens(at home because I love Aliens and I had to watch it again!). I specifically watched a reconstruction of the work print of the movie before they cut David Fincher's work down for the theatrical cut, thus turning it into a less interesting movie. It's not great even then, but it's clearly a better experience and definitely feels like Fincher's first feature film. I mean this as both "It feels like he made it." and "He had a long way to go."  I dunno if I'd recommend it. And for Resurrection, I do not, unless it's to laugh at it. It really sucks, it's directed well enough and the effects are pretty good, but the writing is so fucking terrible. This is an early Joss Whedon and it may as well be a more recent Joss Whedon, it's really bad. Maybe Joss Whedon was always terrible? I know people really like Buffy the Vampire Slayer but... I've heard he claims this was an Alien parody script he wrote that they turned into a somewhat more serious movie which is why it's all so fucking stupid, but for one thing if he did he sounds he's like covering his ass, and for another even then well all his jokes suck anyway even as parody. It's just an annoying and stupid film. Like for fuck's sake, spoilers Riply dies at the end of 3 and they clone her and bring her back this time and now she's like a human-xenomorph hybrid but she also has the alien baby she got impregnated with in 3(yeah it's a weird movie) because uhh... they cloned her. Like I guess by cloned you mean we literally copy pasted her at the exact moment of her death. It's fucking stupid. I actually like how the baby ends up looking it's really fucked up, the front part of it's skull looks human so it has these sunken in skeleton eyes it's a cool design. Wish it was in a better movie. Shit sucks.

 

Also saw Kung Pow: Enter the Fist. Gotta say, I prefer Kung Fu Hustle. I know that this is a full on like, Airplane/Naked Gun style parody with stock footage from an actual kung fu movie but still, as far as funny kung fu movies go I'd rather watch one that's just part comedy. It was alright though, I laughed at a lot of this and man, you can really see how this influenced internet humor because it is pure "lol so random." That's all I got to say, pretty funny but not that funny and it doesn't even feel like that good of a parody. 

I then watched The Hitcher, and it's remake from 2007 of the same name. The original is the best 7/10 I've ever seen, I can't confidently say it's more than that, but for a simple, low budget little thriller it's really good. Rutger Hauer does a fantastic job playing the psychopathic hitch hiker killer, ceaselessly chasing, toying with, and in one particularly good scene emasculating the protagonist. Seriously he really makes this movie, very intimidating and charismatic villain, who you're still happy to get rid of at the end. It ends with this fantastic shot of a silhouetted protagonist and car against the sunset as he hangs his head realizing it's over, but his life has forever been changed by this and what was taken from him in the process was heavy. If I recall, some believe he may have gotten addicted to the thrill and will become the next Hitcher. It's so fucking tense, this guy appears fucking everywhere, it's great. I definitely recommend checking it out. The remake on the other hand blows chunks, Sean Bean's great and all but he's a massive step down and is sleepwalking through the performance. Lots of really dumb contrivances that weren't in the original, it's now about a guy and his girlfriend getting chased and in the end the roles get swapped and the girl has to finish him off. It doesn't look good, it's typical bad 2007 horror movie cinematography and lighting, hell it's just "bad 2000s horror remake" in general. I think the 2000s are a big part of why people think horror sucked before A24 came along to make all horror movies slow burns about trauma. Anyway yeah I don't even have much to say, just a big old downgrade. How many good horror remakes are there? I think The Ring is about it, the american The Grudge is okay too and so is The Ring Two if you wanna count that. I guess The Thing counts, that's my favorite horror movie ever too. But there are so many bad ones, so many.

I also rewatched Videodrome, and I liked it a lot more than the first time I saw it. My stance on this kind of "fucked up and gross for the sake of it" kinda of 80s film has changed a bit and I know for one thing, it was made that way to piss off puritans at the time and I'm getting tired of puritans in my own time, so I can relate. I dunno, it's fun, dark, and very well directed. I enjoyed seeing James Woods's character's slow breakdown with reality and fantasy blurring and melding into one, until they are. It's cool, and James Woods gives a really good performance too. The practical effects are nuts, and very gross, I quite like them. It's genuinely really good and has a lot of cosmic horror to it and I mean, yeah reality degrades at the end and nothing's done about it. They were right, all this sex and violence in the media really did degenerate us, literally, and now we're part of the new flesh... long live, the new flesh.

 

Then, I saw a korean thriller called Memoir of a Murderer, and the last time I saw one of those I had fantastic results, so I assumed I would this time too. But uh... I didn't. It was bad, most of the movie was okay but then there's a twist that opens up a billion plot holes and it all just falls apart. I made a mistake watching the director's cut, and I'll let my Letterboxd review tell you why:

 

"In the director's cut, the ending is that the villain wasn't the villain at all and all of the scenes we saw were actually bullshit, [the protagonist] killed everyone. Now, unreliable narrators are fine. I like it, actually... if the story doesn't contradict itself. A good 'it was all false' ending is set up, you can go back over the movie or what have you and see where it works, or it's something where what was real and what was fake was never clear. But we see MULTIPLE scenes that the main character WAS NOT THERE FOR, and that would be fine if it wasn't for the fact the twist is saying the story he told the cop was wrong, which is what we've been seeing. Which means I guess he was just describing entire events he wasn't there for? Like the whole gang kerfuffle and the villain killing that lady in the bathroom and telling her his backstory? Several of these scenes he wasn't there for are shown in the big flashback at the end that shows how it really went down. You can't do unreliable third person omniscient narration. If he was describing how he thought events he wasn't there for happened then there'd be no bite to that because yeah no shit, what a shock his guess was wrong. I don't think that's what it was going for. No, instead, the film just straight up lies to you. It shows you stuff that didn't happen, not because it's from the perspective of a character who remembered it wrong or is lying, but because that way you'll be shocked when the twist happens. Yeah, I DIDN'T guess the villain wasn't the villain, because you showed him being the villain when the unreliable narrator wasn't around!"

 

If that's confusing, I'll sum it up here: The whole movie is supposed to be the protagonist who was actually the serial killer behind everything, telling the cops a fake story about how one of their officers was actually a serial killer. This story apparently included him telling them the supposed bad guy was in a police gang raid where he killed a woman while telling her his backstory that made him a serial killer, as well as several scenes of him just at the police station and talking with the protagonist's daughter. The latter two are even shown to you again to be like see look he was a normal guy! But that means the movie just flat out showed you something that did not happen at the start, and then tries to act like oh, this was totally unreliable, even though the film's presented in a way where we're seeing what actually happened because it can't be a story he was telling, because we saw shit he couldn't have known. This is, in the same moment, shown to us to have happened, except for the one at the beginning. So either we were getting what happened and not the story he was telling so the first scene where the cop kills the woman is a lie from the filmmakers, or he was telling the police stuff he thought probably happened without letting us know it's his conjecture. Either way, that makes it impossible to figure out the twist, there's no way to figure out what you're seeing isn't legit. The theatrical cut of the film has a totally different ending, where the cop is still the bad guy, but the protagonist has one of his little dementia episodes and thinks the killer is still out there and I guess it's ambiguous as to whether or not he is. What a good call, that's so rare that the people cutting the director's work down are right to do so. Like with Donnie Darko, the director's cut totally fucks it up. The editor was smart there, and he was smart here. He realized the twist made no sense and was impossible to guess, so he said "fuck it, no twist, I'm cutting around this bullshit." Bad movie.

I then, deciding I needed to see more David Cronenberg, watched The Dead Zone. It's, uh, on the low end of okay. Christopher Walken is good in it, but generally I found it pretty boring. Don't even really remember what happened, I think he like tries to assassinate someone at the end cuz the future visions he gets after nearly dying in a car crash is like, ahhh if that guy gets elected a dystopian future will happen, or something. I dunno I already forgot lol, wouldn't recommend it. Usually a Stephen King adaptation is interesting, even if it's bad, but not here.

But then I saw The Fly. Oh, hey, I guess that's another good horror remake! It's really good, thought it was great. Jeff Goldblum does a great performance here, and it's another good "slow descent into paranoia and madness" movie, and a very gross one at that. The effects are, again, really gross and well made here, fitting for turning into a disgusting fucking fly. It really hammers home the idea of not letting your jealousy and lust get the better of you, or you might do something stupid like not notice there's a housefly in your teleporter. Alternatively, bitches just ain't worth it man, don't get so worked up over them. Seriously though it is a good lesson about thinking clearly and not letting your emotions take over, or you may miss some important thing and suffer terrible repercussions, and it may be due to a misunderstanding to begin with. Also, being a fly is fucking gross. I really liked Seth, Goldblum's character, so it was pretty sad to see his downfall and eventual death, spoilers though I'm sure you know how The Fly ends since I sure did. Very well made movie, interesting themes involving the nature of sex, lust, and humanity as well(revelations he made after doing it with his girlfriend is what allowed him to program the teleporter well enough to transport people), the effects are great like I said, good performances, just a great movie.

 

In preparation to watch M. Night Shyamalan's kid's movie, I watched Lady in the Water, which at the time was the only one of his movies I hadn't seen. Gotta watch Trap sometime. Not much to say really, it's as dumb and pretentious as people made it out to be, but I actually don't hate it. It's bad, and not really funny bad like a lot of his others, but there were a lot of things about it I actually found interesting. I think the setting of this big apartment complex is pretty cool, I think the development given to Paul Giamati's character was pretty good, and he was pretty good in general. There are some decent scenes here and there and the general concept is quite good, I actually like the idea of like yeah, this dude's art will be so important in the future it'll change the world. People portrayed it as if it were like oh, the character played by M. Night Shyamalan's work will be so big and popular it will make people work for a better future Wyld Stallyns-style but it turns out, it's a case where in the future someone will become inspired by the really niche work of this guy, one of the few people who really liked or understood it, and he would go on to do great things that help the world be a better place which led to greater appreciation for it long, loooong after he's dead. Yeah it's still a bit self-insert-congratulatory; oh yeah, keep telling yourself no no, they'll all get it well after I'm dead! You'll see! You'll all see! On the other, it's an interesting idea, he takes solace in the idea that if he doesn't give up, even if he isn't there to experience it or the fame, his work will one day be meaningful to people and will one day contribute to the world. Thematically it's important because small things can have big impacts in the future, all things lead to others, that's the nature of causality. You might not think you've made a difference, but you may be one small part of a greater whole, a piece in the greater flow of destiny which would incomplete without you. And none of that actually matters because this is a movie where a CGI bush monster called a "scrunt" I think is after a magical nymph named Story and Paul Giamati is our only hope, and we look to cereal boxes for clues. I had more to say than I thought I guess. Bad, although interesting, movie.

As for The Watchers, directed by one of Shyamalan's daughters, I really do not. She has taken cues from him, set shit up and then beefed it on the payoff. Like Old and Knock at the Cabin, this is apparently based on a book. Which, books kinda suck now so that explains it. The first half of the movie was pretty good, mysterious, decently directed, had some interesting folk lore components. Not bad! Then it just kept going when I thought it was the epilogue. Just, kept going. Ending in the lamest ending possible. The protag girl does this "Ah I know people can be bad and stuff, but there's good people too!" shounen hero speech to the bad guy and the bad guy says "Oh shit I guess you're right, I'll leave this time!" and actually does. Like it was some kind of shounen anime and she's supposed to work hard to improve society and get humanity to achieve it's potential or next time, they'll have to fight to the death. It was so fucking stupid. Mediocre, try harder next time and mimic a better director than your dad lol. Saw it in the theater and oof. Not worth the ticket price.

I watched Mike Flanagan's Before I Wake and maaaan, it sucked. I liked Oculus, and I really liked The Haunting of Hill House, but this one is the pits. Mostly it was the ending which was massively lame. You know how people shit on modern artsy horror movies by saying "The monster was le trauma." well the monster was literally cancer here, not even a metaphor. The little boy in this movie's got psychic powers that make him accidentally project his dreams onto reality, he has a recurring nightmare about "the canker man", and so it sometimes shows up and that's bad and at the end they gotta beat it. Spoilers but who cares it's dumb, it was actually "the cancer WOman" because this is all his trauma from when his mom died of cancer and he was young so he read it as canker and it like represents both the form his mom took when on the chemo scaring him and stuff and also cancer itself. There's some good sads to be had with oh no he was scared by his mom before she died and some catharsis to be had with oh but now he has realized the truth and the cancer man turns back into his mom so no more nightmares and he has overcome the grief :), but it's just too fucking stupid. There's even a part where the adoptive mom explains "You were too young so you didn't know how cancer was pronounced!" like I'm as old as he is. It's so literal, it's taking shit that's even metaphorical in those styles of horror movies and making it actually literally happen, it just seems so on the nose, and is the kind of thing that tricks people into thinking it's deep and meaningful. Also until then it's mostly kinda boring, when I heard there was a horror movie about a kid projecting his nightmares into reality I thought oh that sounds great, but it's really lame. Bad movie.

Then I saw Blue Ruin, which was mentioned in a youtube video I was watching and sounded really good, but it was just kinda normal good. I dunno it's a good movie but there's some kinda stupid stuff in it. It doesn't help that it was billed as an actually nuanced approach to the whole anti-revenge story thing, because it really isn't. Like sure, yeah, as is often the case the revenge fucks up his life and gets him killed but I mean, the people he was getting revenge on were shitty. It tries to do a thing where it's like, ah, but man, they're people too. People who care about their family, and he's getting revenge cuz they got revenge on his dad! But it turns out they're comically shitty racist rednecks who own like a billion guns including guns built into their furniture. That shit was awesome, but I kinda feel like the movie's trying to do something when it's like, the more you learn about them and the more they do the more it's clear these are bad people and you want them to be killed. This would be a-okay if this were done like an exploitation film, but it feels like it is going for a more nuanced thriller because they keep revealing more things about them and it feels like it's meant to be humanizing, but it has the opposite effect. So I would have preferred it if he got his revenge successfully and left instead of it doing the "hurr hurr dig two graves!" shit at the end. Still you know, it was pretty well shot and paced, the action even when it got kinda goofy was gritty and grounded and I enjoyed that. I think the plot of the movie's dumb especially if it really was meant as a cycle of revenge thing especially once you learn what the starting point was, but there are still some interesting things about that and again, directing is good. It was worth watching just yeah, don't go into it expecting a satisfying revenge story of either kind. This isn't 91 days or John Wick. But it is a good enough revenge story even if I felt it was a bit confused, I dunno maybe that's the point to go for a more exploitation-y story with a more gritty presentation and tone to it, but I just think that didn't work for me and I woulda preferred something else. Regardless that youtuber was full of beans. Good movie though, did quite like it I was just expecting a bit more cuz of how it was sold to me. That's probably the real problem, even! If you watch this you might think it's great.

What's not great was Uncharted. Now, I'm not the biggest fan of Uncharted, in fact I'm a pretty small fan of Uncharted honestly. I think the first game's mediocre, the second game is okay, the third game's good enough, and the fourth is very good. The reason is I think each of them manage to succeed in being a playable action movie to different degrees. First 2 both in terms of playing them and the movie part aren't great, third one is better but takes the story more seriously and that's an issue cuz it's full of holes, fourth one has some writing issues and Neil Druckmann-isms but takes it's story just seriously enough and as a game is pretty fun and has the most amount of "playable action movie" parts to it to make it enjoyable. Obviously if you don't wanna play highly scripted set pieces where your input is really light and it just looks cool, you won't enjoy them and would honestly probably enjoy the first two more. Me on the other hand, I like 3 and 4 because I think that novelty is enjoyable, if I want actually meaty action gameplay I can play DMC, junk food is nice sometimes. And regardless of how you feel, they're all at least way less boring than The Last of Us lol. Why do I say all this? Because I only like 2 of the games, and there's like 6 total if you count the Vita one. I think they're a cool novelty, the best compliment I can say is the ones I like are good movies where you're in charge of the hero shooting and jumping. I'm not a big fan of them or their characters, but I still feel like this movie is a complete butchering of the source material. Imagine how pissed you'd be if you were. Though it helps my anger and disappointment that it's a mish-mash of both 3 and 4 in terms of story. It has the Sully finding Nathan and I think the ring stuff from 3, and the orphanage and Drake's brother stuff as well as the pirate treasure from 4. But it's all done, way, way worse. I dunno how you fuck this up, the games are literally action adventure movies, just copy it 1:1. Mark Whalburg is cast as Sully, you know the guy who's like 60 in the games. He's so, so horribly miscast all you need to do is watch a scene of both characters to see what's wrong. They cast Tom Holland as Nathan, which is also such a horrible miscast. You had Mark Whalburg, why not cast him as Nathan? The whole movie Nate's a young doof who's never done any of this illegal treasure hunting shit and barely fights anyone or cracks any one liners, he's just the naive kid you see in all sorts of adventure movies. What is up with that? When I said it has the Sully finding Nathan stuff, what I mean is the whole movie takes place right after that, no flash forward or anything. Mark Whalburg says the line "I'm literally in a Papa John's right now." I could tell you about the story but it's even more generic of one than the games' are. Not a character or a theme to be had, and you've seen the plot a billion times. The directing? There's basically none, it looks boring. The action isn't well choreographed, when it's there. It's a boring, lame, badly written, badly acted and cast pile of crap. I would recommend checking it out of you know anything about the games so you can see how horribly they did this, but only if you're fine wasting your time. How do you bungle this up, it was handed to you on a silver platter! You got a simple story with simple ideas, simple characters with charisma, it's already movie-like in it's presentation and pacing, come on. You WHIFFED and you were playing TEE-BALL! Shit movie.

But Point Break is not a shit movie. I didn't think it was great but it's a good time and worth watching, Keanu did a good job here unlike in say, Dracula, which I think was the previous movie he was in that I saw. There's also a fun Gary Busey performance in this! If you don't know, this is a movie about a cop who's gotta go undercover as a surfer because he's deduced that these notorious bank robbers are surfers by sleuthing some clues. So he poses as a newbie and gets one of the surfers, whom he falls for, to help him learn. It just so happens she's a member of group who are the bank robbers, though she's not involved. He ends up getting close to them and learning about their way of life and yeah, you know where this is going. It's a pretty good take on that sort of story I think, the cinematography and acting is good, but it's nothing special. I would say check it out for those aforementioned Keanu and Busey performances, and just because it is a good movie and fun watch. The climax and ending are also really good, and it's got a bit of the same appeal as Heat just not nearly as well done. Recommend, good movie.

Then I saw Broken Arrow, which I for some reason mix up with Point Break(I wanted to watch both though). I really liked it! You wanna talk about great character actor performances? Well John Travolta really steals the show with this one. God damn, he's so much fun to watch in this, I'm wondering if he isn't actually a sociopath himself. This is the one that people say is really similar to Face/Off and I don't agree, aside Travolta acting insane and him making people think the protagonist is the bad guy. This is 90% them fucking around the desert and trying to get back nuclear weapons so Travolta can't blackmail anyone with them for money and stuff. It's a really, really fun time though, I think the other actors are giving fun performances too, Travolta just outshines them. The action is good as you'd expect a John Woo movie to be, this is just a really good fun 90s action movie. If you like that kind of thing, especially the really cheesy ones, check it out. I get what people mean by Woo's Hollywood stuff not being as good as his Hong Kong stuff, but I'm having fun with them. Gotta see, what was it, Hard Target next? Great movie.

I also saw Top Gun, which was, uh, not as good as I expected but still good. I think, like most people, I cared more about Maverick and Goose's bromance more than Mav's romance with that woman I barely remember. When it was focusing on their friendship and their rivalries with other pilots, it was fun, but when not it wasn't great. I don't think the dogfights were that excitingly shot either, but they were still pretty fun and enjoyable. And of course the Kenny Loggins soundtrack was great. I don't have too much to say, it was definitely good but yeah I expected a biiit more. Still, a fun time and I recommend it if you haven't gotten around to it yet like me. Gotta check out the sequel some time. Good movie.

Then I fucked up and started wanting to watch horror movies after Halloween, so I started a horror movie marathon in November. 

The first one I did was Barbarian and... it's, I guess it's okay? I really liked the first half more, aside from a well-shot flash back scene that changed aspect ratios in the second half, that part was just lame and kept getting lamer. It focuses on this character who just confuses me, I'm not sure what they're going for with him aside from the possibility it's a "fuck le straight white men amirite?" sort of thing. Hard to even really explain, he just sucks and his character goes nowhere while he acts like he's trying to make it go somewhere, and then he dies. I guess it's a subversion of expectations maybe? I know they did this with the homeless guy and it was just as dumb. Or maybe he purely exists to suck and you hate him and want him to die, which just becomes irritating instead. I just dunno, either way it made the second half drag. The first half is slow, moody, lots of build up and atmosphere and all that shit. But I do not care for the second half, and the more I try to think about what it was going for, the more that comes across as really stupid, so it's best I keep it to surface level so I can say it was just okay, because at least it gave me some good horror for most of it. Ending's dumb too. Not good movie.

Speaking of stupid, I saw a Stephen King adaptation by a director I like, In the Tall Grass by Vincenzo Natali, director of Cube. It was good! Not amazing it has a lot of bad CG for one thing lol, and the directing as actually only decent, but it's cool. Lots of weird shit happens without a lot of explanation, because it's a Stephen King story, and the antagonist is really over the top and goofy while still being kinda intimidating, because it's a Stephen King story. I thought it was well paced and built up though, definitely lots of good mysteriousness, and later on there's some great imagery too. It's definitely my kinda movie, even though what it turns out to be is kinda stupid, because it's a Stephen King story. But I had a good time, the execution's not great but that bad guy's performance was really good, that mysteriousness is exciting, and there were some really interesting ideas too. This is a good Stephen King story, for sure. I can't tell you a lot about it, cuz spoilers, but I'll give you the premise: Some people stop near this church on a highway and get lost in a nearby a field of very, very tall grass. Something's odd about this grass, as time and space don't seem to behave right. You can be going right toward someone or back the way you came and never make it to them or the highway. They tried jumping up over the grass to see where it was and going towards it, but when they look over it again they're in a different spot. Same with seeing other people, jump up and they're over there now. Not to mention, people start hearing other people say things that you then see that same person say later on in the film, past and future keep getting mixed up. It's really cool and things just keep getting worse. Though there's no explanation for how exactly that's happening, there doesn't need to be because that's just cool on it's own, and serves to make their escape difficult. This ain't great, but it's good, and I'd recommend it if that sounds interesting. It's also not too horror, much more supernatural thriller, so if you aren't good with horror you should be able to handle it. Good movie.

Then I saw some short horror films by some youtuber named Curry Barker? I dunno but they were good! There was one called The Chair which was another kind of breakdown of reality into paranoia and confusion that I liked, with a ton of unnerving scenes and a dark ending. It was great, actually got to me and there are a lot of interesting small details. Very good and strange idea for a horror short. It's just this guy gets this chair and shit starts to go bad after that. He keeps blacking out and then his girlfriend says he did a bunch of shit in the time he can't remember. Spooky. Warnings was a kind of surreal story about this guy who finds this note on his car about how he shouldn't drive home and is really unnerved by it, and then keeps finding more notes trying to warn him and they're too cryptic as you'd expect. The ending is weird and there are cool dream sequences, though none of it's as good as David Lynch film would be. Then there was Milk and Serial which was just okay, it's about a prank channel but like, one of the guys is a serial killer and there's this whole plan of his to make his friend actually kill someone cuz of a prank gone wrong and the plan's convoluted enough to be interesting but also kinda stupid, and there's some subplot about him kidnapping and murdering women. I dunno, there are some good parts but it didn't really do it for me. Still, kid's a good filmmaker and might end up doing a feature some day, if he does I'll check it out. 

But then I saw the real good shit, and re-watched a John Carpenter horror movie, In the Mouth of Madness. It's a Lovecraft style story about a Lovecraft style author named Sutter Cane, Sam Neill's character is hired to go find the missing author because he's his publishing company's cash cow. This is of course right after a crazed man attacks him and asks "Do you read Sutter Cane?" I really don't wanna tell you much more, because there's a lot of interesting and fun horror things that happen from then on out. It's just really good, is another one of those "reality breaking down and paranoia" movies. I really do like those lol. The tone is different, of course, but if you like them too check it out if you haven't. Great movie.

One I don't recommend though is Oddity, a movie that actually came out in 2024! I saw some good reviews on letterboxd and it sounded interesting, but it was pretty boring. I don't even know why I'm bringing it up, I guess to say never trust reviews. The ending's a huge let down too, I was never even a little scared, it just kinda drags. I dunno I wasn't into it. There are some okay things here and there and it's not like it's a bad movie, but I did not enjoy it. I barely remember anything other than this blind woman brings this weird like wooden doll thing and puts it at the coffee table because like, she wants to get revenge on this guy who she believes killed her sister, I think? I dunno, I feel like that kinda went nowhere too from what I remember lol. Mediocre movie.

End of Days was also mediocre, it's a 1999 supernatural horror action movie with Arnold Swartzenegger where he fights Satan, but it's not very exciting. Not only is there some really bad writing in some places, it isn't well shot and the story in general is just kinda dumb, and extremely cliched. Arnold feels really miscast in this, I don't buy him as this kind of hard boiled detective at all. It becomes alright in the middle with this scene where the devil's trying to tempt him, not only does the devil give a good atheist speech about how much god sucks, Arnold actually does a good job at going between the different emotions elicited by the devil tempting him with getting his murdered family back, eventually rejecting him and fighting him off. In that moment his generic tragic past is actually well done, the rest of the time it's never even really a factor. It also becomes kinda fun at the end when it becomes and action movie and Arnold actually fights Satan, but you gotta wait through a pretty generic 90s movie until you get there. Medicore movie.

But I'd watch it a billion times over the Jacob's Ladder remake. I apologize to The Hitcher, at least it was actually remaking the story of the movie it was remaking. This is clearly just some unrelated script that someone noticed had a few similarities, like questioning reality, a drug, and PTSD ridden veterans. Otherwise, it's a totally different movie, and not even a good one besides. There's this part where his head does the spasm like in the original and it feels so much like it's there to say "look, just like the original!" At first, I didn't think it was that bad, but it gets worse and worse as time goes on and ends on big wet fart. Not to mention, it's confusing and I think it doesn't really make sense. Like neither did Jacob's Ladder, but it had a supernatural explanation that did explain all the shit that was happening. Once you know the twist here, which is that this experimental PTSD drug made him think he was his brother and had his nice life, it actually doesn't really make any god damn sense. There are some bits of it that are done well to show some things he thinks are happening aren't happening, but when you think back at a lot of the scenes that couldn't have happened, it doesn't really work. I guess that's also an element from the first, the which life is my real life thing, but we find out pretty definitely and it's not at all for the same reasons or the same kind of thing. Some producer probably got handed a script someone had that no one wanted to take, noticed it had a few similarities, and said "Well hey, nobody's made a remake of Jacob's Ladder yet!" Which seems like a dumb idea, why remake this movie? It's very cult, most people only know about it because of it's influence on Silent Hill I think. I'm pretty sure it wasn't that popular. Who are you cashing in on?! Shit movie. 

Finally, somewhere in between there, I also saw The Wailing, a south korean horror thriller movie. This wasn't as much of a mistake as Memoir of a Murderer, but it wasn't that good either. Worth checking out especially if you didn't have the same problem as me, but I just didn't like the ending at all, not just the twist but the ending itself was kind of a let down. The start and middle of the film are pretty good and there are even some scenes I thought were very well done, but I kinda feel liked this movie is confused. There's some scenes that, if it was full of them, would be an entertaining bonkers movie but instead it just sometimes gets kinda silly but is mostly serious. The ending twist I feel like creates some plot holes, it explains some scenes but left me with questions about the character's behavior and honestly, it was just kinda lame. I don't wanna tell you since I didn't dislike it enough to say I don't care and I'll spoil it, but it's a mystery reveal trope that I just don't like. But it's not bad, typically it's well shot, it's maybe a little too slow paced, but there are some pretty good spooky and tense scenes over the course of this. I can see why other people liked this a lot, I just didn't enjoy it that much, mostly because it let me down in the end. It's a horror/mystery story about some very, very strange murders happening in town in which normal everyday people end up killing their families. What could possibly be driving these average villagers to such violence? Saying anything else is a spoiler but yeah, it's primarily about this fat cop and his family and him kinda trying to figure stuff out, but there are several other characters it focuses on as well though he's the main one. There's some good, I think I don't know Korean, performances here too and some neat characters, so maybe check it out yourself. Okay movie.

Speaking of mysteries that let me down in the end, I also watched Danny Boyle's Trance. The director is pretty good, you probably know him for stuff like 28 Days Later and Sunshine, both of which I think are good. And this one was good, honestly very good, until you actually find out the answer, and then do the climax of the film. There are some cool parts of it but overall I honestly thought it was kinda dumb, and besides it's dragged out to hell and back. It's a story about a guy who was involved in an art heist, he was working at the auction house handling it and was meant to actually let them have it, but he tries to take it for himself, but because he got hit really hard on his head by the butt of the main criminal's shotgun, he lost the memory of what he did with it after that. His former partners in crime aren't happy about this, but they can't torture it out of him, so they end up going to a hypnotist who they think can help recover the now buried memories. The thing is, every time we get really close, the movie cock blocks you, and it often takes long as breaks in between attempts. By the end, it's been spinning its wheels for a while, so much so that the very snappy and stylish directing and editing stops being as impressive. Then you find out what happened and man, can you believe it, that this repressed memory wasn't just caused by the head injury, but because he did something bad that he wanted to forget? In this thriller about uncovering buried memories?! Wow! I'm barely spoiling anything, it becomes clear by the end of act one he's keeping something horrible he did down and that's what's making finding the painting so hard. So we spend the rest of the time just stylishly delaying the inevitable, and when you do find out, I think the twist is kind of dumb and once again calls a lot of one of the characters' behavior into question. Further, what happens from there is kinda even dumber to me. The very final ending stinger was kinda lame too. Combine this stuff and it's not not as great as parts of it are. Feels like they had the ideas and not enough to connect it with, so they came up with some middle bits and some end bits that just weren't as good. Boom 100 minutes. Still, you know, it's worth it for the good parts. Like I said it's really stylish in it's directing and editing, very exciting and well, thrilling. There's some cool and often mind bending journey into the mind stuff and just as many fake outs that got me because it wasn't clear if we were in the real world or the representation of the mental one. Even if there were just as many that were obvious lol. But it's an interesting and, well, half unique movie and for a lot of it I was hooked. It's a big let down at the end, but I recommend this one more than The Wailing honestly. Watch it for sure, just be ready. Okay movie.

But what was much, much better was Jackie Chan's Police Story. This one is great. This is his directorial debut, and it shows. This movie has so many crazy fun choreographed stunts and set pieces, it's just so much fun. Some of them aren't even action, but comedy setpieces, like when Chan's character is trying to answer phones and juggle calls when everyone else at the police station is busy. It's very funny when it's funny, and really cool when it's cool. It's a story where Chan's character is, well, you know the typical cop action movie character who's a loose cannon but gets results and all that, but with a side of likable goofiness to him because it's Jackie Chan, it's very similar to how he was in the City Hunter movie. The first set piece results in this shantytown getting a big chunk smashed out of it by cars, then all the bad guys flying out of the windows of a bus. There's a scene where a woman fucks with him and records over an important confession and makes it sound like they were fucking so he plays it for the court and everyone's laughing about it. There's another scene where a car gets super ripped apart and smashed up by people trying to kill him. There's all sorts of shit that people get thrown into that breaks. There's tons of slapstick comedy. And it's all so, so well choreographed. The climax of the movie takes place at a mall and so much shit gets broken it's great. There's bloopers at the end that show how tough it was to do this and then also some of the times Jackie nearly killed himself, as is usually the case. It's great because of how much must have went into doing all of this and because the result is genuinely really cool. I will absolutely watch Police Story 2. I highly recommend this if you enjoyed other Hong Kong action movies, if it's more than a few like me you've probably already seen this lol. But if you have, I hope you're happy to know I loved it. Great movie!

And, finally, I saw The Platform, or "El Hoyo." This is a Spanish language movie, of the hispanic kind, and it was okay. Pretty interesting, it's a lower budget movie about a guy who's in a special kind of prison where a platform with food lowers into your cell for a few minutes each day, and you can eat whatever you want... if there's anything left. Every month, everyone is knocked out and randomly assigned to a different level. Those on lower levels are unlikely to make it, due to all the food having been eaten. There's enough food that if everyone ate just as much as they needed to survive, everyone might be able to eat. But, when you've been on a lower floor and barely gotten anything, you just eat your fill when on the higher floors, knowing those below you would do the same. Besides, it's your turn now. Gotta get some retribution! Obviously, this is a big commentary on human nature, and it's pretty good at that, but as for a film it's just okay. I found the most interesting parts to be the beginning and the end, while the middle kinda drags. It's very dark and cannibalism ends up happening, as you get a cellmate/emergency ration in each cell, and all that's pretty cool, but yeah it's a very simple story and takes a while to even get to that simple plot. But hey, it was cool and interesting, would say to check it out sometime. Okay movie.

 

Dang, I saw a lot of movies huh? And this was actually skipping over some I rewatched! Here's looking forward to watching and rewatching even more this year too. 

Nothing too interesting to end us off on, but that's how it goes sometimes. I hope you enjoyed reading and maybe found some new movies you might like to watch. I dunno how many I'll watch this year, but I've already seen some good ones like Mulholland Drive, Armageddon(yes), and Suspiria(the original). Uh, I recommend those too. ButIsawthemin2025sotheycan'tgohere. Anyway yeah, movies are great, and I hope I see more good ones this year. No more deciding to watch bad horror remakes like Jacob's Ladder's I hope.

As for the new movies I saw, I guess out of all of them Dune Part 2 would have to have been the best, the other two I thought were mediocre. So I guess if you really wanna know what the best new release I saw was, that's it.

GOODBYE I GUESS I DON'T HAVE ANYTHING ELSE TO SAY!