🍿 Heretic (2024) was a low-budget, high-suspense portrayal of a psychopathic Hugh Grant, and unlike his prior attempt it just flew by even at 110 minutes run time. The movie has four actors, a few set pieces and no highfalutin' special effects: kudos to A24 for still making them this way.
Some good news to start the week:
- Project Hail Mary, my notes on the book here, is being turned into a movie and the trailer has just been released. (↬Marty Day)
- The directors are Phil Lord and Christopher Miller of the Spider-Verse, which is excellent.
- The cinematographer is Greig Fraser of Dune, which is even better.
- The star is Ryan Gosling, which, well, you can’t win them all.
The NYT is collecting readers' votes for their list of 100 best movies of the 21st century and, well, I made some interesting choices. I do stand behind each and every one of them!
For those not using X, I picked:
- Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (2022)
- Memento (2001)
- Spirited Away (2002)
- Oldboy (2005)
- The Lives of Others (2006)
- No Country for Old Men (2007)
- There Will Be Blood (2007)
- Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
- Godzilla Minus One (2023)
- WALL-E (2008)
🍿Annie (1982) was messier than I remembered. I guess it’s hard to make a throwback to 1950s musicals when none of the skills survived — all that staircase dancing would have made much more sense with Gene Kelley doing the moves.
If not for Carrol Burnett it would hardly have been worth the rewatch.
Scott Sumner notes some underappreciated movies, most of which I haven’t seen, so now my to-watch list has grown threefold. He thinks that the greatest films of all time were mostly done in the 1920s through the 1970s, and I absolutely agree! My favorite came out in 1952. (ᔥTyler Cowen)
🍿 Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (2022) was a riot. Reading about the intricacies of how they managed to fit all the celebrities into 22 days of planning and 18 days of shooting — on an $8M budget and with a constantly shifting cast — was almost as entertaining.
“The whole set up cost 2 billion dollars." (ᔥDaring Fireball)
🍿 Flow (2024) was an odd movie. The animation was no better than a video game — the most excellent Stray comes to mind — which is not to detract from its beauty but to highlight how far gaming has come. The story is a bigger mystery. Was there a deeper meaning to the almost-human but not anthropomorphic animals behaving the way they did, or did the animators go with it for as long as time and finances allowed and then just stopped? An anonymous person on Reddit has a good explanation.
🍿 A Complete Unknown (2024) was fine. Timothée Chalamet looks like Bob Dylan and has a better singing voice. Ed Norton was even better: his interpretation of Pete Seeger would be a great children’s show host. The only thing missing was why any of this mattered. Maybe you had to be there?
🍿 ParaNorman (2012) from Laika wasn’t to the level of Coraline which preceded it or Kubo and the Two Strings which came right after: you can sort of see the movie it could have been had it gone through a few more feedback cycles, Pixar-style. Still quite good, and now on our Halloween to-watch list.