“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.

🍿 Anora (2024) telegraphs what it will do and then does it, and I have become so jaded by movies that I thought it would never do that and yet it did. What 60 years ago was the price of entry is now so rare that it turns you into an automatic award contender. So be it.

🍿 Martha (2024) was well worth the time (nearly two hours — long for a documentary). Excerpts from her 30-minute rant to the NYT about why she hated it were the cherry on top. Only in America…

This is explained, sort of, by her being descended from Serbian cat people. At one point in the movie a very catlike woman addresses her, in Serbian, as moja sestra — “my sister.”

I am always on the lookout for an unexpected mention of my people, and Alan Jacobs delivered.

🍿 Wicked (2024) was longer and clearly more expensive than the stage version yet somehow neither as dramatic or as magical. It was just too much CGI. Ariana Grande’s singing was noticeably not up to par with Kristin Chenoweth’s, though her comedic timing was surprisingly apt. Cynthia Erivo was stellar, but again, CGI drained quite a bit out of her performance so the grand not-quite-finale finale (Defying Gravity) felt flatter than the stage version.

Or maybe I just prefer the theater?

🍿 The Wild Robot (2024): beautifully made, needlessly violent. Crazed chases and shootout spectacles push out a sweet children’s story. Too bad.

🍿 Krampus (2015) is comedy-horror fun for the entire family with great practical effects and a clear, if simple, message. Will watch again, this time next year.