2021

[Derived Absurdity]

Spider-Man 2 (2004) - Yeah not only just as good as remembered but better, for the same reasons as the first one. In fact everything the first one did, this one does better. The script, the pacing, the writing, the themes, the emotions, the action, the villain, the performances, the special effects, everything is better. It's not quite as campy and clunky as the first one, it flows much smoother, it's certainly much more serious overall, which might mean it's not quite as much fun to watch, but it's still quite fun. I don't know of any other movie that feels or looks quite like this one, including the first one (and I don't know of any movie that feels or looks quite like the first one, either). The action sequences are bigger, better, brighter, and faster than the ones in the last one, and at the same time, the smaller emotional moments and overall emotional arcs are denser, richer, and more resonant than those in the first. I genuinely care about the people in these movies in a way I very rarely do when watching movies - partly because of nostalgia, but partly because the movie dares to treat them and their emotional problems seriously. But not in a self-consciously serious way, not in a way that makes it look like it's trying to make a big deal out of being a serious character drama, but in a way that feels natural and emotionally intuitive. Like in a way that the movie doesn't make it seems like it has to strain or make some kind of conscious effort to be human and connect with people. It's telling that this huge superhero blockbuster movie doesn't start off with a visually stunning action set piece, but a close-up of a character's face (on a billboard) and Peter Parker's everyday struggles with his McJob. And I was struck a little over two-thirds of the way through at how so much of the screenplay just consists of people talking. I think this movie cares about people in a way few other blockbuster movies do.

So yeah, like the first one, it's heartfelt and engaging and emotionally affecting. Like Fury Road, it is itself a superior example of several genres of movie smashed into one - it's great as a romance, it's great as a character drama, it's great as action. It's also a great illustration of how to balance and juggle tones. I've said before that I get really annoyed when movies jarringly switch between radically different tones so that I feel a sense of emotional whiplash. Well, this one does that, but somehow it makes it work, possibly because the emotional current underneath it all remains consistent and easy to intuit throughout. Its effectiveness at striking the appropriate balance between cartoonish absurdity and tangible emotional realism is by far its biggest strength and something I haven't seen any other movie - again, including the first one - do nearly as well. This is a very confident movie - it knows exactly what it is and what it wants to be and what it wants you to feel and what to do to make you feel it.

The fact that this movie is objectively better than the first one in virtually every respect, including the pacing and editing and performances and special effects, means it loses a bit of the rustic, grounded, down-home charm the first one had, which on one level means it's not quite as fun to watch. It's definitely more polished, less homey, somewhat less anachronistic-feeling. That doesn't make the first one better, it just makes the two movies different. But its sense of charm is still profound. In fact these two movies have more personality and charm and heart than almost any movie I can think of, certainly any blockbuster movie. I feel like if there's any genuine weak spot in these movies it would probably be Mary Jane's characterization, but Kirsten Dunst is probably my favorite actress and her portrayal of her is fantastic so it's not that bad to me. It's also easy enough to give her character more psychological depth than the movies did in my head while watching it like I did with Astrid in How to Train Your Dragon. Other than that, there are no flaws. This is the best superhero movie ever and one of the best movies ever.

[Raxivace]

I haven't had a chance to revisit the Raimi Spider-Men in a long time, but when I complain about MCU or whatever these movies are one of the main things I'm holding them up against (At least the first two. I remember liking the third Spider-Man when I was young but a lot of people hating it).

Raimi himself is supposed to be doing a Dr. Strange sequel IIRC- it will be interesting compare that against these Spider-Man movies.

[Derived Absurdity]

I hear rumors that the cast of the Raimi trilogy is supposed to return for the next MCU Spiderman or something. Like they go into an alternate dimension or something. Idk.

It will be interesting to see Raimi get MCU-ed.

Submarine (2010) - a thoroughly mediocre little indie drama thing that is only slightly elevated by being more mildly cynical and mean-spirited than average. I also liked Yasmine Paige's performance as the mildly sadistic yet compelling and somewhat vulnerable love interest, and I was sort of into their weird quasi-femdom relationship when I first saw this, like, ten years ago. I think I only put this on my favorites list because it helped awaken something dark in teenage me. Other than that there's nothing to it.

[Derived Absurdity]

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) - I don't know. It was fine. It's the only horror musical I've ever seen or even heard of, and I probably liked it because of its dark edgy aesthetic. But it's just okay. Kind of bland. I don't care much for the flat saturated monochrome visual style. This is a musical adaptation, so I guess you should pay particular attention to things like staging and blocking and mise en scène, and they were all quite bland. The musical numbers themselves were not particularly engaging or creative. The movie seems insecure or embarrassed at being a musical, so it stages all the musical pieces like a regular traditional movie with standard shot/reverse shot and so on. Everything looks fake; the blood looks like tomato soup. The tone was weird; most of the movie seemed like it was some dark serious melodrama, but then halfway through there's a peppy song about killing and baking people into pies and it switches randomly into black comedy, where there was barely any hint of comedy before, black or otherwise. And the song itself was oddly subdued and flat; for a song with such hilariously deranged lyrics, you would think it would be sung with pure maniacal comic energy, especially by Helena Bonham Carter, but nope, they felt like they were just going through the motions. That's what this whole movie felt like; it was just going through the motions, there was little passion or creativity to it. I quite liked Johnny Depp's performance as Sweeney Todd. He looked so incredibly angry and hate-filled and scary and done with everyone's shit and exactly like someone who would go on a misanthropic murderous rampage. I also liked the "My Friends" song. That's about it.

[Derived Absurdity]

Synecdoche, New York - I get the feeling that everything this movie is saying about life, I would agree with, if I could actually suss out wtf it's saying. It's honestly severely unpleasant for me to sit through, and not in the "oh yeah, it's certainly depressing" way, the "holy fuck I am bored out of my fucking mind" way. Like, sure, this movie is no doubt very profound, but the actual experience of watching it is agonizing. I am probably 100% on its intellectual wavelength, but 0% on its emotional one. Like yes, it is probably correct about the absurdity and futility of making sense of out existence, but I couldn't possibly care less while watching it. You'd think I'd appreciate it more, but I don't.

[Faustus5]

Synecdoche, New York - I get the feeling that everything this movie is saying about life, I would agree with, if I could actually suss out wtf it's saying. It's honestly severely unpleasant for me to sit through, and not in the "oh yeah, it's certainly depressing" way, the "holy fuck I am bored out of my fucking mind" way. Like, sure, this movie is no doubt very profound, but the actual experience of watching it is agonizing. I am probably 100% on its intellectual wavelength, but 0% on its emotional one. Like yes, it is probably correct about the absurdity and futility of making sense of out existence, but I couldn't possibly care less while watching it. You'd think I'd appreciate it more, but I don't.

I was also emotionally detached while appreciating what it was doing on a purely intellectual level. Just glad he's out there doing his thing.

[Gendo]

I remember loving the movie; but not much else specifically. Needs a rewatch.

[Derived Absurdity]

Tangled (2010) - It was nice. It was pretty. It was charming. It had a lot of charm.

I don't know, that's about it. It's about a step above "passably entertaining", maybe a few steps, primarily due to its aforementioned charm and its pretty woodsy throwback fairytale atmosphere. The character animation is good. Rapunzel is hot. Everyone thinks Flynn is hot, so I'm allowed to say that. She's the only animated character I remember thinking is hot, besides maybe Azula. And also maybe Sam Manson and Ember McLain from Danny Phantom. Also Tinkerbell from the 1953 Peter Pan when I was a kid. I'm getting off topic. She's also possibly the most bland and shallow Disney princess of the last few decades, which is not good. She has no psychological depth or realism; this movie could have quite easily been twenty times more entertaining and interesting if they gave her any at all, and IMO it would have been incredibly easy to do. This girl has been locked in a tower for eighteen years, only interacting with one person; how difficult would it have been to show some mildly realistic consequences of that? Social aversion/fear? Awkwardness? Weirdness? Emotional/behavioral instability? Literally fucking anything? They had so much potential with her and they opted to make her possibly the most boring and shallow protagonist in decades. She's just generically quirky and adorable and marketable.

Like, just one example here. Instead, say, of being curious about the lights in the sky because Mother Gothel stupidly told her they came every year on her birthday, she could figure out on her own, in her abundant free time, using science and math or whatever, that they were not normal stars and want to find out about them out of pure intellectual curiosity, a longing to understand the outside world. This makes both her and Mother Gothel look significantly smarter and also give her a reason to want to escape her room that isn't centered on herself, making her more likeable. All in one easy stroke. A very, very simple improvement. Examples like this kept compounding by the dozen as I watched this movie.

"Boring and shallow" is a solid description of practically everything here. Its world (socially, not physically; aesthetically it's great). Its villain. Its story. Its music. Its character relationships. The ending is saved from this simply for being bizarre and nonsensical. The romance is also boring and shallow, but has an undercurrent of severe creepiness since Rapunzel is only eighteen and Flynn is probably a decade older and she's portrayed as basically childlike, sheltered, naïve, and easily misled; kind of the kid-friendly version of the disturbing Born Sexy Yesterday trope. He has zero business entering into a romantic relationship with her and the fact that she entered into a relationship with him - literally the first guy she ever met - is not healthy. The whole thing is more disturbing the more you think about it.

Rapunzel is also very passive as far as Disney princesses go. In the climax, Flynn and her chameleon friend basically kill Mother Gothel for her, even though Mother Gothel was undoubtedly her demon to vanquish and not theirs; Flynn essentially usurps and overtakes her character arc and agency by cutting off her hair against her consent to kill Mother Gothel (which is also basically violating her bodily autonomy, but whatever I guess). And even the random and nonsensical bit with the magic tear healing Flynn is a demonstration of her passivity since she didn't even know about it and did it by accident. And at the end they even make a point to emphasize that Flynn proposed to her and not the other way around, making sure she remained passive to the very end. (And she gets over Mother Gothel's death extremely quickly. No potentially interesting or sympathy-inducing psychological scars or consequences here.) So yeah, this movie is very pretty and charming, but hollow and empty. A bland vanilla whitebread piece of fluff.

And Disney is not incapable of delivering psychological depth/realism. They did it with Belle. They did it with Quasimodo, who parallels Rapunzel in many ways. They did it with Lilo. They could have done it with Rapunzel.

As an aside I was also sort of amused that Rapunzel's hair could not only heal injuries and sickness but also reverse aging. This movie was ahead of the curve in portraying the aging process as a sickness you can be "healed" from. Tangled = transhumanist.

Anyway, we're entering the home stretch, people!

[Derived Absurdity]

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - Slightly less disturbing than Tangled, I respect this movie much more than I actually like it. The last third or so of it is so insane that it makes you forget how boring the first two thirds are. The frantic nervous intense filming style mixed with the extremely grimy and gritty and sensory-focused, almost animalistic cinematography (focused on primarily physical sensations like the intense heat, the stench and decay, the intrusive nerve-rattling sounds, and so on) mixed with the constant shrill industrial squealing that passes for the score mixed with the highly disturbing subject matter and Sally's constant screaming through the last thirty minutes just makes the experience feel insanely overwhelming and horrific, and I don't really think it's lost much of its effect since it came out in 1974. There's little that helps distance the viewers from the emotional impact of the profoundly fucked up surreal shit the last third of the movie subjects us to, like a sense of irony or dated special effects or bad acting or anything else that would remind us it's all fake (particularly since a knowledge of the behind-the-scenes stuff would tell us that a large amount of it wasn't fake). The dinner scene hits a level of disturbing that most horror movies I've seen don't even attempt. And of course the ending is excellent.

Unfortunately, as I said, the first two thirds are kind of boring. Very slowly paced, with shit characters. There's a reason almost everything in here that people still talk about and remember happens in the last act. I also don't like the character of Franklin at all, and it's not a coincidence that the movie's quality sharply picks up immediately after he's killed. I'm not sure what the point was in making him paraplegic or making his personality so weird and off-putting, or giving him so much screen time if he's just going to be unceremoniously killed off halfway through for shock value. So, yeah, I technically don't like most of this movie, and I can't keep it as a favorite if I dislike most of it.

People say one of the genius things about the movie is that, despite the fact that the title is just a string of words that are heavily associated with violence and menace ("massacre", "chainsaw", "Texas"), it's not particularly violent. It's actually extremely violent, but on a psychological level. What it's not is gory, and the lack of gore is what makes the violence that does happen feel more intimate and effective and brutal. Many people claim they see the meat hook physically go into the girl's back, complete with blood and viscera splattering, and yet they never do. The only time we see an actual chainsaw touch a person is Leatherface's accident at the climax. It takes real skill to make a film that is such a violent psychological assault - due entirely to the filming style and cinematography and score - that it convinces millions of people that they saw buckets of gore when they never did. Part of the film's lore is when a censor of some sort tried to take out all the gory parts and found he could barely find anything to take out. This basic fact more than anything else showcases why this film is so well-respected, and why even now it still retains its effect, quite apart from any intellectual or thematic meaning one may wring out of it. It's kind of like Fury Road, in that it subliminally gives people the impression that it's super violent and gory even though it's not.

If there is a theme that can be gleaned from this movie, it's of the random cruelty of the universe and the meaninglessness of the human condition. A bunch of teenagers, who are not even particularly unlikeable (they're not likeable either. They're just kind of nothing), get randomly brutalized by a pack of cannibals through no fault of their own. Sally only survives the encounter through luck, accident, and incompetence on the cannibals' part. The grave robber gets mowed down by accident. There are no heroes here; there isn't even a protagonist. Franklin is our protagonist most of the time, but then he dies and it suddenly switches to Sally, someone who barely existed before, when things finally start happening. This was, perhaps, done on purpose; the lack of a protagonist, someone who stabilizes and centers the narrative and who we're meant to relate to and identify with, disorients us even more than we were, and it undermines something we like to believe and which we like to see reflected in film: that we are essentially protagonists with some level of control over our lives. In this movie, there are no protagonists, and the characters - even the villains - are in control of virtually nothing. This is almost the quintessential horror movie in that sense, since horror movies are supposed to horrify you, and very few ideas are more horrifying to people than that. That the world is random and meaningless and cruel and unstable, and sometimes shit just happens. Maybe that was a potent message during the oil crisis and Vietnam and Watergate, which allegedly colors this movie (especially with all the hyperbolic and melodramatic news readings which portrayed a world in chaos). Maybe that was the point of Franklin having paraplegia.

There's also the animal rights message, which is not subtle, especially near the beginning. The cannibals are former slaughterhouse workers and they describe killing animals in gruesome detail. All the kids are murdered in ways that animals are killed for food. Leatherface makes weird animal noises. There are cuts to actual animals on farms. The three cannibals could be representative of different stages of the butchering process. There's also Tobe Hooper explicitly stating the film was about meat and that he went vegetarian after making it. So... there's that. The big message behind The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is stop eating meat.

So, yeah. Good movie. I respect it, very much, but I don't like most of it, so it's not a favorite.

[Derived Absurdity]

The Truman Show - It was good, I guess. I liked the score and the premise was mildly interesting. Probably seemed more interesting back in 1998. I guess it deserves credit for predicting reality television or whatever.

[Gendo]

It's far better than you give it credit for. Having seen it a couple months ago; it remains completely brilliant. Especially the score.

[Derived Absurdity]

It didn't do much for me this time.

Toy Story 2 - I think this movie is severely underrated. Yes, kind of strange to say for a movie that is universally loved and considered one of the greatest sequels of all time, but... I don't know, man. It's always seemed kind of obvious to me that this is Pixar's masterpiece, easily the greatest Toy Story movie, quite possibly the greatest sequel of all time, and probably the greatest animated movie ever made. (I know I said that about How to Train Your Dragon. They're tied.) The fact that this movie absolutely towers above the rest - the rest of the Toy Story franchise, the rest of Pixar, the rest of (Western) animated film - has always seemed to me pretty much self-evident, something I didn't really know was in serious doubt. And yet this is the lowest rated Toy Story movie on IMDB. People talk about it like there's some kind of open-ended debate as to which Toy Story is best. I don't get it. I feel like I'm being culturally gaslit about this movie sometimes.

It is vastly superior to the first one in every way. The animation, the characterization, the creativity, the plotting and pacing, the emotional depth, the thematic maturity, and the raw entertainment value are all significantly improved. It's also vastly superior to the third, since the third is mostly a retread of this one and depends on it for most of its emotional impact. I don't know, do I need to go into any detail on this? This is just clearly a perfectly constructed film. It deeply enriches the first instead of just adding on to it; it basically flips the thematic message over - whereas the first one was about sibling rivalry and learning to accept a new addition to the household (a message for kids), the second was learning to accept being there for your kids despite the fact that they will inevitably grow up and leave you (a message for adults), and it was pretty beautifully told. It does that annoying thing sequels sometimes do where they suddenly make their protagonist "special" or significant or important in some way after starting them off as random nobodies, but here it worked since the only purpose of that plot development was to deepen and enrich Woody's internal conflict. The A plot with Woody, Jessie, and Stinky Pete is slower, richer, and more personal and deals with more mature themes and complex emotions and was clearly meant more for adults, but Jessie and Bullseye and Al are fun enough for kids to not get too bored by it, and the B plot with the Buzz and Co. shenanigans are geared more for kids but adults will be entertained just fine by it as well, and it's a pretty perfect balancing act altogether. Jessie is a good character, fun and entertaining on the surface but with depth, complexity, and pathos underneath. It was very nice that she wasn't ultimately reduced to Woody's love interest (they saved that for her and Buzz in the next one, a gag which was kind of cute but ultimately stupid, another reason that movie kind of sucks). I guess the only real criticism I have of this movie is the twist villain reveal. It didn't really add anything and didn't make much sense. Also the villain's ultimate comeuppance sort of leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Other than that I consider this to be pretty much the Citizen Kane of kids' movies and, kind of like How to Train Your Dragon, which is the only other animated movie that could be said to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with it in my mind, presumably forever overlooked.

[Derived Absurdity]

Two Days, One Night - Wow, I haven't seen this since it came out and I was kind of expecting it to be underwhelming, but it very much was not. It's excellent, a very humane and sensitive depiction of working class desperation and depression, with an amazing performance by Marion Cotillard at the center. It has a very simple and, to be frank, slightly contrived (IMO) premise: a woman named Sandra working at a solar panel factory finds that she's being laid off, since during her leave of absence management found out her co-workers could cover her shift with slightly longer hours, and they bribe them with a bonus if they take a vote and agree to squeeze her out. Sandra's friend manages to convince one of the managers to agree to a second, secret ballot early Monday, and Sandra has to try to individually convince each of her co-workers - almost of whom voted for her to leave - to vote against their bonuses and for her to keep her job. I have never heard of a company doing anything like this, and it doesn't seem like a particularly plausible premise, but this movie makes it work well. It basically just tracks Sandra as she spends her weekend making emotional and vulnerable pleas to most of her co-workers one by one, most of whom are in just as bad financial straits as her, each confrontation its own miniature desperate moral drama. This is clearly a case of capitalism/management pitting workers against each other and the movie lays the blame for this stupid and pathetic situation Sandra and her co-workers find themselves in squarely at its feet. None of this would have happened if the workers had unionized or, better yet, rose up and guillotined their worthless bosses and took over the factory themselves, which is what I was rooting for the whole movie, but it didn't happen.

Besides that, this movie is also an extremely effective and moving depiction of someone with clinical depression, one of the best I've ever seen. Also (maybe) social aversion/anxiety, which would have made her weekend-long trek all the more traumatic. Imagine you're a clinically depressed, anxiety-ridden, financially insecure woman with kids to feed who has to spend your weekend begging your co-workers one by one to forgo a raise so you can keep your job because they voted you out. Some people think this movie is repetitive, since it basically consists of Marion Cotillard individually confronting her co-workers and saying the same thing over and over again, but there's a lot going on in every interaction. Every one is an attempt by Sandra to assert her own self-worth, to her co-workers and to herself, in a world that is seeking to devalue it and deny it. Sandra's journey here would be absolutely psychologically devastating even for someone mentally healthy, let alone someone who just took a leave of absence for depression, and it's wrenching to watch her have to go through it. This movie is a very humane and empathic examination of what it's like to have depression, to have social anxiety, to have issues with self-worth, of the horror of having your well-being entirely dependent on the judgments and selflessness of other people, as well as a searing indictment of capitalism - in other words, almost of my major interests mixed together. It's no wonder I like it so much.

It's good.

[Derived Absurdity]

Up in the Air - I don't know, I don't have a lot to say here. It's all right. I didn't think it was quite as good this time as it was the first time I watched it. Or more accurately its effect on me the second time was relatively muted. It was sort of melancholy, but it was also kind of cloying and lukewarm and unrealistic/implausible and I found I didn't agree with its central message very much. Frankly everything George Clooney's character was saying made more sense to me when we were clearly meant to disagree with him than what he was saying after he allegedly found enlightenment, and I didn't really buy the idea that his love of air travel and hotels masked a deep well of pain and loneliness, or the implication that anyone who chooses a similarly solitary lifestyle must be feeling something similar, and that you just need to settle down with a spouse to fix it. A huge draw of this movie is George Clooney's charm, but I can watch pretty much any other George Clooney movie for that. It's perfectly fine as a piece of light pleasant genial sentimentalized Hollywood existentialism with a conservative/conventional moral at its center. Still better than most movies I've seen.

[Derived Absurdity]

Vertigo - I had a very lukewarm reaction to this again. I guess I don't really "get it" and I don't particularly care to. I don't know what the big deal is.

[Gendo]

I didn’t get Vertigo either.

[Derived Absurdity]

The Virgin Suicides - Good movie. Somewhere between Sofia Coppola's other two movies on this list. Out of all of her movies I've seen (which are all except On the Rocks), this one is probably the most "conventional", the one most like a regular movie, the that follows all the traditional steps closest and from which an overarching message can most easily be discerned. Which is saying something, since it's still pretty unconventional and thematically and narratively murky. I like it for all the predictable reasons. The gauzy, dreamlike, nostalgic atmosphere. The mood. The soundtrack. The subject matter. The thematic subtext. Kirsten Dunst. It's all good. It's all about the male gaze and objectification/dehumanization/mystification and how males perceive females (especially in adolescence) and the hidden horrors of suburban Americana and whatnot - in that sense it's pretty similar to The Girl Next Door, although way less harsh and horrific. Objectification/dehumanization is bad, it leads to bad things.

Not much of a review, but don't know what else to say. Watch it if you haven't, it's good!

[Derived Absurdity]

Where the Wild Things Are - It was good. Fine/good. Somewhere between those.

[Derived Absurdity]

Wreck-It Ralph - Hugely entertaining, imaginative, engrossing, exciting, creative, with a good story and good characters and a good message. Not saying it's as good as Pixar at their best but it's on par. Some of the emotional aspects felt kind of forced. Other than that it was great. The Oreo gag cracked me the fuck up.

[Derived Absurdity]

Your Name (2016) -

My words from two years ago:

It was good. Not really what I expected. The aspect of it that everyone said was its primary story was really only the first half, and then a sort-of twist a bit before the halfway point led the story down an entirely new direction that the first half was mostly only a set-up to. I liked the first half more. I was much more invested in it, while in the second I was much more emotionally passive (although it still had some touching and beautiful moments). If you take the film more cerebrally than it's intended a lot of the plot developments are extremely arbitrary and nonsensical, which will you take you out of it if that's stuff you care about. I was led to believe this was a romance movie with fantasy elements, and there's definitely a strong emotional intimacy to it, but as I said the story abruptly switches to something other than romance halfway through, and if the romance was eliminated the plot would have stayed the same, so I'm not sure it really qualifies. I definitely recommend it, though. Also this is by far the most beautiful animated movie I have ever seen in my life. The backgrounds were almost photorealistic. I have never seen that in an anime movie. That's pretty cool. I should probably watch it again soon.

Well, I did, and I stand by what I said. It's still good; not one of my favorites.

That is all.

[Derived Absurdity]

K, I'm done with this stupid project. My new list of favorite movies, with the extra special favorites in bold:

12 Angry Men
The Apartment
The Bad News Bears
The Conjuring 2
The Edge of Seventeen
The Florida Project
Fucking Åmål
The Guest
Happy-Go-Lucky
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Heavenly Creatures
Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey
How to Train Your Dragon
Lilo & Stitch
Lost in Translation
Mad Max: Fury Road
Marie Antoinette
Mean Creek
Nightcrawler
Pan’s Labyrinth
Perfect Blue
Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl
The Piano Teacher
Princess Cyd
Pulp Fiction
Spider-Man 1
Spider-Man 2
Toy Story 2
Two Days, One Night
The Virgin Suicides
Where the Wild Things Are
Wreck-It Ralph

There you go. Let the judging commence. It's much shorter - it went from 69 to 32 - and much less distinguished, but also less insecure. This was an odyssey of self-discovery and I have come through it a better, stronger man. Thank you, everyone, for going on this journey with me.

[Faustus5]

There you go. Let the judging commence. It's much shorter - it went from 69 to 32 - and much less distinguished, but also less insecure. This was an odyssey of self-discovery and I have come through it a better, stronger man. Thank you, everyone, for going on this journey with me.

And thank YOU for your efforts. I was inspired to go back and watch some films over again, and I've added a few new ones to my future viewing plans.

[Gendo]

Because I can; here is the sub-list of those that I've seen. And it's almost also the sublist of those that I own on DVD; with the only 2 exceptions being Homeward Bound and Perfect Blue (Perfect Blue has been on my wish list forever).

12 Angry Men
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey
How to Train Your Dragon
Lost in Translation
Mad Max: Fury Road
Mean Creek
Nightcrawler
Pan’s Labyrinth
Perfect Blue
Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl
Pulp Fiction
Spider-Man 1
Spider-Man 2
Toy Story 2
Where the Wild Things Are
Wreck-It Ralph

[Derived Absurdity]

I tried to fight the impulse... I really did... but it was just too strong. I will at least attempt to do the decent thing and try to keep these things short.

Palm Springs - Watched it, thought it was ok. Watched it again to see if I would think it's as great as everyone else does a second time, but I still think it's just ok.

Don't Look Now - good if you want a two-hour tour of Venice. Also good if you're having trouble falling asleep and can't afford NyQuil.

Antebellum - the most offensively stupid and worthless mainstream movie I've seen in several years. It is impossible to summarize succinctly what is wrong with it, so I'm not going to try. Suffice to say that it's a fractal of awful; no matter what layer of it you look at, no matter what angle you view it from, no matter what level of analysis you choose to stop at, it is supremely, hideously awful. It is unending stupidity all the way down, a hall of mirrors of stupidity. One of those "I genuinely want to know what the unholy fuck everyone involved in this was thinking" movies.

I Kill Giants - it was one of the better examples of the oddly specific "moody films about a lonely kid who invents a magical wonderland as a form of psychological escape from their crappy home life" subgenre of movie that was sort of popular a few years ago, at least until the end, where it turned all sappy. I watched this because it had Madison Wolfe in it and I was impressed with her performance in The Conjuring 2. She was pretty good here, but she was still better in The Conjuring 2.

Some Like It Hot - I'm sure this is as good as everyone says, but I turned it off after twenty minutes so I don't know. Not my type of movie.

The Way, Way Back - Boy, I sure wish that when I was an introverted fourteen-year-old boy the cute girl next door and the cool dad surrogate/mentor figure would have tried to randomly befriend me for no conceivable reason. AnnaSophia Robb plays The Girl Next Door here while Duncan's Manic Pixie Dream Girl gets to be played by Sam Rockwell. A very generic and lazy coming-of-age drama, the plot is a bunch of checklists, the characters are all shallow archetypes, the story is just blatant wish fulfillment. No real drama, no psychological depth, no character growth. Everyone our protagonist doesn't like sucks and everyone he does like is great. No nuance, no subtlety, no maturity. It sucked. It was also incredibly misogynistic. There was a gag where a water park worker would make teenage girls wait on the entrance to the water slides for an uncomfortably long time just so he could creepily ogle them, a gag that seemed to go on for thirty full seconds. This was meant to be amusing, not disturbing. And later our protagonist does the exact same thing as an illustration of him coming out of his shell. Wonderful. Also all the teenage girls in this movie are bitches. Except AnnaSophia Robb, who, of course, hates all the other teenage girls, which means she was cool. This movie sucked. Naked wish fulfillment like this is embarrassing to watch; it's almost like peering into someone's private sexual fantasies.

The Others - It was fine. It was a moody ghost story with a twist that came out at the time of The Sixth Sense, so unfair comparisons are made, so I will say The Sixth Sense is much better.

Old - This was fucking stupid, but I wasn't expecting anything else, so I wasn't disappointed. But it was even more stupid than I expected. If you view it as goofy camp I guess it's not too bad, but still not particularly good even as that. A horror movie about the aging process had quite a lot of potential IMO, but this squandered absolutely all of it.

[Derived Absurdity]

Spoilers for the new Spider-Man movie below!! omg spoilers!!




Spider-Man: No Way Home - I enjoyed watching it, which is not to say it was a good movie. It might be a good movie, I don't know, I'll probably have to see it again to make that judgment. Most of it was pretty average, with the glaring exception of the fan service, which went above and beyond. The fan service is the only reason I went to see it, so I'm very satisfied. Andrew Garfield proved that he can make an excellent Spider-Man and actually might potentially be the best Spider-Man of the three actors, all things considered, and deserved much better than the scripts he was given. Tom Holland was also quite good. Tobey Maguire was just kind of there, but it was appreciated anyway. Willem Defoe easily stole the entire show, and this movie utilized him *much* better than Raimi's did. If anything it showed that the 2002 Spider-Man was guilty of a borderline unforgivable act of criminal negligence by wasting Dafoe behind that goofy Power Rangers mask for the entire movie. The pivotal action sequence after the Green Goblin revealed himself was also very well-done and more tense and gripping than any action sequence in the Raimi trilogy, including the train scene. So there you go: I acknowledged two big things this movie did much better than Raimi's trilogy did. Let no one say I can't be fair.

The ending also silenced all the people, like me, who kept bitching about how the MCU Spider-Man lost his spiritual and thematic connection to the actual Spider-Man by having his working class roots and personal financial/existential struggles erased in service to becoming a billionaire's apprentice. The ending fixed that. He's not Iron Boy anymore. He has no connection to Iron Man or the Avengers or anyone else now, even his friends, and he lives in a shit apartment all by himself with no money. He's on his own. He's actually Spider-Man now. This entire trilogy was just revealed as essentially Tom Holland's Spider-Man's origin story. That's kind of cool. I'm actually sort of interested in where they're going after this.

I also want to add I've never had a theater experience like this movie before. It was packed full, and people were yelling and clapping at all the appropriate moments. I go to movies all the time, and no theater I've been in ever reacted as strongly as this one when Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire revealed themselves for the first time. People lost their fucking minds. It was fun. People actually laughed when Willem Dafoe said the "I'm something of a scientist myself" line, which is cool as it proves the Raimi memes have escaped from online. I'm glad apparently so many people still have as much love for the original Raimi movies as I do. I guess I knew they did, but it was nice actually being there and experiencing it.

[maz89]

I also want to add I've never had a theater experience like this movie before. It was packed full, and people were yelling and clapping at all the appropriate moments. I go to movies all the time, and no theater I've been in ever reacted as strongly as this one when Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire revealed themselves for the first time. People lost their fucking minds. It was fun. People actually laughed when Willem Dafoe said the "I'm something of a scientist myself" line, which is cool as it proves the Raimi memes have escaped from online. I'm glad apparently so many people still have as much love for the original Raimi movies as I do. I guess I knew they did, but it was nice actually being there and experiencing it.

Totally my experience. It was awesome. Meant to be seen in a cinema.

[Gendo]

I didn’t get as big of a theater reaction; but I still got some which is more than I normally have gotten in any other movie. Mostly a brief and appropriate clapping at the reveal of Charlie Cox and then later with each alternate Spider-Man.