🍿 Tokyo Godfathers (2003) was the perfect Christmas movie that rewards careful viewing, with character design and comedic timing that make all the difference. Unlike other Satoshi Kon fare, it had (mostly) kid-friendly content, no complex cuts, and many laugh-out-loud moments.

🍿 Perfect Blue (1997) is a (gory, adult) masterpiece of storytelling and editing which inspired many more works of art. The blurrying of fantasy and reality lands particularly hard in this era of AI slop, and I suspect Satoshi Kon’s Paprika (2006) will have aged even better.

🍿 Spellbound (2002) was as delightful as I had remembered it. This is the third or fourth time I have seen it, and as with any good work of art the experience becomes richer each time. What made this viewing the best was that we had our spelling bee-bound kids with us who had never seen it before, providing some hilarious commentary.

Somewhat less delightful was seeing how some of the kids did in the 20-some years since, but even those stories — except for one — were more hopeful than I would have imagined.

🍿 Grizzly Man (2005) is peak Werner Herzog. What other filmmaker would voice over images of bears frolicking in a national park with:

“I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but hostility, chaos and murder.”

Roger Ebert had a very good review to which I have nothing to add.

🍿 The Family Plan 2 (2025) was, much like its predecessor, a tame mid-budget family action comedy of the kind they don’t show in theaters any more (and for good reason): perfect for post-prandial viewing in this holiday week.

🍿 Wake Up Dead Man (2025) was a better murder mystery than Glass Onion with a more poignant message than either of its predecessors. Rian Johnson has an uncanny ability to pick the right topic to pick on, and the theme of religious revival was spot on.

🍿 Watched: The Twits (2025), an attempt to draw out Roald Dahl’s slender book about an insufferable couple into a 100-minute feature film. In the process, they made a truly classical piece of Netflix polished excrement.

What they should have done was a series of short vignettes, Tom & Jerry style, that could have all been physical comedy with hardly a spoken word. Booba and Gudetama — both streaming on the same service — are good examples. But no, the movie that is nominally about the Twits instead revolves around 10-year-old orphans who behave like adults and magical creatures that belong to Dr Seuss more than to anything Dahl wrote. Even the eponymous couple behaves altogether differently than in the books: the Twits I know would never have cooperated long enough to build a fully (if barely) functioning theme park.

My own children — two of whom have read the book — quickly saw past the gimmick and lost interest despite the beautiful animation and a million things happing all at once for the sake of keeping their attention. In contrast, they have seen — of their own volition — The Mitchels versus the Machines, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and more or less the entire Studio Ghibli repertoire countless times. With all of those still available, what exactly was the point of The Twits?

🍿 Perfect Days (2023) was the perfect movie, with a story that could not have been told through any other medium. In that way it was the polar opposite to that year’s Oscar winner for Best International Film, and I am certain it will be remembered longer and more fondly than The Zone of Interest.

🍿 A House of Dynamite (2025) was the horror movie of the year — nay, decade — with a soundtrack made for nightmares. It is also the most geographically correct DC movie in ages, although in 10 years living here I am yet to see someone wearing a clean suit take a WMATA bus to work. Regardless, it was heartening to see that even Netflix could produce an occasional diamond.

The British crime drama Broadchurch came out in 2013. John Favreau’s food porn vanity project Chef was released in 2014. Despite both now being more than a decade old, in my mind they are still filed under “new things that came out that we missed because we had an infant in the house while also being medical residents”. It was therefore jarring to see how dated they both were, and for similar reasons.

Broadchurch deals with the murder of an 11-year-old boy in a small coastal community. Twitter is mentioned a handful of times, only in the context of breaking news. There is no Instagram or messaging apps: pre-teens email each other. The boy’s family is at a loss for how to attract national attention to the killing and finds the answer in a tabloid journalist. It all feels quaint, though admittedly I don’t know if that was intentional even in 2013 (from the edgy music and the oh-so serious tone of the show, I suspect not). I won’t mention a recent British show by name for fear of spoiling other, but if you’ve seen both you will now what is the clear parallel and how much things have changed.

Chef, on the other hand, is completely Twitter-dependent, and is arguably one of the first movies to use Twitter #MainCharacter dynamics as a plot point (Justine Sacco had landed a few months before the movie was released, and probably wasn’t even on Favreau’s radar). Twitter is shown in a completely positive light, and I can’t think of any other movie that has done that. It is also a good time capsule of the food trucks on Twitter craze. The early 2010s were the peak time for both, before culture wars killed one and covid the other.

So now I am inclined to see what else came out in that 2010–2015 period. Is it too early to be nostalgic for those times?