🍿 Inside Out 2 chose not to emphasize phones and social media, even though it is a story about the anxiety of a 13-year-old girl. It was the right choice to make, timeless over topical, with real-world stakes being delightfully low for all the turmoil inside Riley’s head. That’s puberty.

🍿 The Hunger Games (2012) came out the same year as our first child was born, and now that the child is old enough to participate it was time to finally see it.

The West Virginia aesthetics of District 12 were fine, but the over-the-top style of the capitol city dwellers was jarring. So was the architecture, which looked like what DC would be if all of DC were one large L’Enfant Plaza. Yikes!

I don’t know how much money Jennifer Lawrence earned from being in this franchise, but it really should be all of it — she was the only reason it was watchable, dare I say even enjoyable.

🍿 Incredibles 2 (2018) made several questionable choices that resulted in something less than the original:

• Picking up right where they dropped off was lazy and showed lack of trust that the audience can pick up the threads.
• Ditto for following the same ally-turned-foe pattern.
• Having the kids be the saviors reeks of typical Hollywood plotting; let kids be kids, even if they have super powers!
• Why oh why did they drop the “The”? Brad Bird’s answer to that one was that “it just sounded stupid”. Dumb it down some more, please, Brad.

At least the soundtrack didn’t disappoint!

🍿 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.