🍿The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, extended ed. (2001) deserves every superlative you can throw at it. While by no means perfect — the closing credits go on for 20 minutes yet Tom Bombadil is still missing — it is as close as anyone has gotten to perfection.

🍿 Elemental (2023) is a sweet kids' movie that has seemingly little to offer to the adults in the house. That’s a first for Pixar, but why not: our demographic has already been served this year. The message may be more complex than it lets on… I’ll leave that for a re-watch.

🍿 Murder on the Orient Express (1974) was apparently the only film adaptation that Agatha Christie liked, though she thought Albert Finney’s mustache weren’t impressive enough. It’s a good movie and a remarkable cast, but I bet she would have found David Suchet’s Hercule Poirot even better.

Watching Across the Spider-verse reminded me of a recent article panning Phil Lord for his obsessive iterations on what the animators thought were finished sequences, because “the working conditions required to produce such artistry are not sustainable”. To those who don’t mind being jackassess go the spoils.

🍿Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse was the perfect sequel. I can’t imagine anyone who liked the original not being absolutely thrilled, with a twinge of sadness for never again being able to see either with fresh eyes. I look forward to the 7-hour Spider-verse viewing party whenever Part 3 comes out.

🍿 Re-watched Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) both for palate-cleansing after a not-so-good attempt and to set stage for the sequel.

My gosh, what an outstanding movie, never mind the nitpicks. They swung for the fences like Pixar shuld have, had they listened to Hypercritical.

Craig Mod reviews Oppenheimer:

Strauss and his kangaroo court and Oppenheimer’s philandering all become (quite frankly) sort of meaningless things in the greater context of quantum matter, in the context of splitting the atom, in the context of briefly running a nuclear reactor beneath a football field in Chicago, in the context of somewhat arbitrarily vaporizing a few hundred thousand civilians. I couldn’t but feel heartbreak that the miracle insights of our consciousness (we are the eyes of the universe looking back at itself and all that), the ingenuity of our skull-protected meat-lumps, played a distant second fiddle to (an admittedly well-acted) Downey Jr. as Strauss and his bafflingly pea-sized ego.

Could not have said it better myself, and not for a lack of trying.

🍿 Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken (2023) is a better sign of Pixar’s fall from relevancy than their box office bomb that wasn’t (and which, NB, we haven’t seen yet). Ruby…, you see, is one of many recent animated movies influenced by Spider-Verse… for style and The Mitchells… for substance. I would rather have watched either of those for the umpteenth time than Ruby… this once, but it was set under water so the kids liked it.

1. It wasn’t the movie I wanted to see. The best, most dramatic parts, the ones that people (where by “people” I mean myself) actually cared for were in Los Alamos and centered around the atomic bomb. So Nolan chose the wrong book to make into a movie: it is all about the bomb, not the man.
2. Or, if you are to be so anthropocentric, why make it about only one man? The Manhattan project featured so many colorful, smart, obnoxious characters that it would have been the perfect ensemble movie. Have Wes Anderson do it (although, yes, he kind of did). Have Aaron Sorkin do it! Because Nolan will inevitably turn everything he touches into a puzzle box, and…
3. this time, his puzzle is pretty puny. There is a moment near the end of the second act which felt like a parody of an M. Night Shyamalan twist. “I knew it, it was X all along”, she screams and throws her glass on the floor in a culmination of… nothing much, actually. Because what is revealed was obvious, and there is nothing leading up to that moment that would make you think anyone was even paying attention to some milquetoast backdoor machinations. It felt like a piece of film got lost on the cutting room floor. Maybe that’s the twist?
4. Hans Zimmer was not involved in the making of the score, though you could have fooled me. Having a movie set in the 1930s through the 1960s feature only the migraine-inducing synthetic throb of Gotham’s best instead of some period music, even during the (many) party scenes, was a choice for choice’s sake and a stupid one at that.
5. To be clear, the cinematography is wonderful, the casting of Mr. and Mrs. Oppenheimer perfect, and dear oh dear wasn’t that scene with Gary Oldman just marvelous? They deserve all the praise and awards they will likely get, if the juries still remember them by the time the awards season comes because there are at least two more potentially great movies to watch out for. What a great time for cinema.

🍿 Rewatched Gone Girl (2014) solely because of my dad, who remarked how Ben Affleck had never been in a good movie, which reminded me of this one. And yes, it took all of David Fincher’s and Rosamund Pike’s skills to make Affleck watchable, but it is the end result that matters!