🍿 Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical was a lovely reminder of Tim Minchin’s work which I had, years and years ago, followed more closely but 3 children and one cat later have almost forgotten. Also, someone please give Emma Thompson an award for best acting under prosthetics.

🍿 Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio: beautiful stop-motion animation with inexplicable changes to the original. What is it with del Toro and fascism? Still, it has easily become our household’s cannonical version of the story.

🍿 A Trip to Infinity started off strong: I can never get enough Steve Strogatz, and between him, Eugenia Cheng, and Moon Duchin the first third of the documentary focusing on mathematics was stellar. Then came the muddled physics and incomprehensible philosophy. Too bad.

🍿 Top Gun: Maverick was, no doubt, the best comedy of the year. By the end I felt like standing up and chanting U–S–A, and I was bombed by those photogenic sociopaths not so long ago. The magic of cinema…

🍿Strange World had some interesting ideas, but the message got in the way of a good movie. And I don’t mean Disney’s first openly gay character (even there, The Mitchells… did it better), but its notion that destroying rather than improving technology will save the planet. Nope.

🍿Glass Onion: more Triangle of Sadness than Knives Out — the latter being a better movie — but still enjoyable. Kate Hudson and Janelle Monáe were excquisite.

One can hope that the third in the series, if there ever is one, focuses more on the murder mystery than on eating the rich.

We watched Gremlins again for the first time in more than 10 years. A few things stood out:

• Apparently, back in 1984 you could be 24 and a Vice President of a bank and it wouldn’t be considered a parody.
• Billy Peltzer is… simple-minded? Stupid? Having an aw-shucks-gee-wheez personality is one thing, but an adult behaving like a grade schooler is just being reckless.
• Mr. Futterman comes accross as someone who would, if he were around today, wear a red baseball cap and vote for Trump. Yet back in 1984 his thinking was that anything foreign was broken by default and inferior to American-made. Today, ⊕ Not my own view, to be clear. it is the US of A that is broken and overtaken by superior Asian and Arab infrastructure. Xenophobia will allways adjust to the current moment.
• Did they shoot the town scenes on the same set as Back to the Future? They did come out within a year of each other.
• Speaking of other movies: the next time we watch I will try and count all the references, obvious and hidden, to other movies. It seemed like every movie Spielberg made until then had a call-out.
• The little green mosters hijacking Futterman’s snow plough as the full Gremlins soundrack blasts for the first time was as thrilling as I remembered it.

It kind of made me want to see Gremlins 2 again, as bad as that sequel was on first (and only) viewing.

🎥 Triangle of Sadness

• Part 1: A masterpiece of dialogue, acting, pacing, everything. Give it an Oscar for the best short film.
• Part 2: Physical comedy brilliance. Absurdity starts creeping in.
• Part 3: So on-the-nose. Did Kusturica make this?

Would still recommend.

Singin' in the Rain is my all-time favorite movie so its thorough deconstruction was a joy to watch, listen, and read. 🎥

(Found via Dan Cohen’s blog, which I have just rediscovered. I look forward to finding other hidden treasures in my RSS back catalog!)

British Film Institute’s once-per-decade survey of Top 100 movies of all time is out, and it is great. Any list that has both Singing in the Rain and Mulholland Drive in the Top 10 is my kind of list! 🍿