🍿 Interstellar (2014) was enjoyable enough to watch with my tween daughter, even though it’s not great sci-fi. She liked it — it does feature a man flying into a black hole — but I stand by my original opinion.

The Incomparable’s episode about The Boy and the Heron was a good sanity check that my own intuition was right. Yes, it’s weird and yes, most of it is just a dream, following the incoherent-but-comprehensible dream logic better than most movies. As a non-native speaker of English I did not find Christian Bale’s voice acting as off-putting as TI guests did, but I agree that he comes off as not a very nice person and even a bit of a war profiteer. How that can be any different in the Japanese version I can’t foresee, but I’ll find out soon enough.

🍿 Ten Meter Tower (2017) is a 15-minute documentary available at The New York Times website (it’s a gift link, feel free to watch now). “Documentary” is a loose description as the setup is contrived: 67 people who saw an online add asking them to climb up a 10m diving board and jump (or climb down!) in exchange for ~$30. There are cameras and microphones and other volunteers waiting for you to jump so they would have their turn and the reactions people have are priceless. Recommended.

🍿 The Babadook (2014) is a better meme generator than it was a horror movie. A bit of a spoiler here, but the movie is ten years old: the ending killed the mood by turning it into a morality tale. Kudos for making it bloodless yet suspenseful; negative points for the too cheery of a conclusion.

🍿 The Boy and the Heron (2023) was the weirdest Miyazaki movie we’ve seen, and the competitions is strong. It starts with the misleading title (the original How Do You Live would have made more sense), continues with the heron’s terrifying transformation, and ends with bizarre fantasy world building.

The best explanation I can think of is that most of the movie was the boy’s fever dream after a self-inflicted wound to the head. I’ve had dreams where strange twists made perfect sense and in which I acted as if I knew what was going on. It is best, then, to squint and follow the dream logic without worrying too much about the mechanics. The message in that case is clear: there is malice in all of us, but let’s not allow it to carry us away. Not original, but important.

🍿 Dune: Part Two (2024) was as good as it gets. There were only so many things Villeneuve could have brought into focus from the copious world-building of the books, and he chose ones that were right for a movie. Part Three will be a blast.

🍿 Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022) was an unexpected delight with a tight story, smart humor, and subtle Spider-Verse animation influences. It’s Sony Picture’s world now, followed by DreamWorks Animation, leaving Disney/Pixar a distant, sad third.

I think I figured out what bugged me about Netflix-produced live action shows: their gloss-to-effort mismatch.

Imagine a 2x2 with the horizontal axis showing effort required to make something (time spent developing the script, repeating takes, editing) and the vertical axis showing how glossy the output is (which is mostly a function on equipment quality and CGI). Here are the four quadrants, clockwise from top right:

1. High effort, high gloss: the HBO quadrant or, if you are move into movies and like aliteration, the Kubrick quadrant — where show runners obsess over every detail and are sometimes even accused of mistreating employees. The quadrant where a man notorious for going behind schedule over budget builds a ship only to sink it — and win nearly dozen Academy Awards for it. Note, however, that many HBO shows are actually in the
2. High effort, low gloss: the CGP Gray quadrant, where hundreds of hours of research are sublimated in talking stick figures. The Wire and Curb Your Enthusiasm would be here, as would some of the best movies coming out of Hollywood which have to make an additional effort not to be too glossy and feel “more authentic”, though there is a thin line between actual and high-gloss authenticity. Interestingly, CGP Gray himself is on YouTube, but most of YouTube is in the
3. Low effort, low gloss: the YouTube quadrant, epitomized by its very first upload and now flourishing with DIY instructions, unboxing videos and attempts at ASMR. I suppose most if not all of TikTok, YouTube shorts and Instagram Reels (or are they Stories?) would also be in this, the quadrant for the rest of us. Note, however, that much of what we now think as “YouTuber content” falls instead in the
4. Low effort, high gloss: the Netflix quadrant, also known as “we’ll fix it in post”. Expensive actors aren’t that expensive if you only do one take per shot and you don’t need to scout for locations if every scene is shot in front of a green screen, but hey it’s a Dolby Atmos DolbyVision Dolby Everything 4K HDR 120Hz wonderland which screams high-quality but feels fake. Much of highly lauded AppleTV+ content would also be here, Disney+ as well, Amazon Prime Video goes without saying. Billions of dollars spent on fake gloss that people easily sense, and even if they can’t put it in words they vote with their eyeballs which continue to be glued to the other 3 quadrants.

To be clear, there is effort spent on the gloss too — but that effort could in some cases be seen as polishing a turd. So another way to name the quadrants would be:

1. Polished diamond
2. Diamond in the rough
3. Turd in the rough
4. Polished turd

Only one of those doesn’t make sense, and it’s the one we are avoiding! “Turd” may be too harsh — I view this very blog as having both its feet planted firmly in quadrant 3, but I hope you get the idea. Terminology aside, it’s a useful mental model to have.

Netflix has just scooped up two of the very best things I recently saw:

• Scavengers Reign (originally on Max)
• Godzilla Minus One (originally in theaters)

They mostly make chum, but between licensed excellence like the above and a few gems of their own a subscription is still worth it.

🍿 Meet the Fockers (2004): lowbrow American entertainment at its finest, but you can see how the line from lowbrow to crass is about the be crossed. The third installment — which we haven’t seen yet — apparently did cross it, as did every comedy DeNiro has done since.