🍿 The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025) was a waste of good actors, fantastic (hah!) set design and Michael Giacchino’s era-appropriate score. There are concepts that work in comic books which are just too big for movies, and Galactus is one of them.
🍿 Urchin (2025) was a decent anti-drug movie, but why the overblown praise for Harris Dickinson as a first-time director? Kudos for steadying the camera and not going too close into people’s faces, I guess.
🍿 Any Given Sunday (1999) is a pro sports movie that doesn’t mention the Internet and barely recognizes gambling. What a difference 27 years make.
🍿 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?