🍿 The Incredibles (2004) will be 20 — yes, twenty — years old this October. On one hand it shows, as there are YouTube-only cartoons that now look better than what used to be Pixar’s best; but I still can’t think of a better combination of characters, plot and action in a family movie. And of course there is the soundtrack, Michael Giacchino’s first and probably best (here he is talking about it at the Kennedy Center 6 years ago.

🍿 Father of the bride (1991) started off strong, but Martin Short’s performance, if you can call it that, made it into an unwatchable mess. It did make me want to watch the original, 1950 version, starring Spencer Tracey as the father and an 18-year-old Elizabeth Taylor as his daughter (from the poster: The Bride gets the THRILLS! Father gets the BILLS!).

🍿 The Matrix (1999) was as over-the-top cool as I remembered it, though younger generations will now apparently use the word “cringe”. OK, zoomer.

🍿 Inception (2010) was better and more coherent than I remembered. There have been so many variations on the theme since it came out that we’ve become accustomed to the mechanics — enough so that the plot now feels almost too simple for Nolan, but just perfect for an enjoyable movie.

🍿 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.