Favorite films

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1948

★★★★½ Liked Rewatched 11 May 2025

New Beverly matinee with the kids — not their first time watching but their first time on the big screen. Costello is some kind of comic supernova for these children, at least, like big belly guffaws. I think this is, like, a perfect gateway movie for young youth? You got horror but for laughs, Old Hollywood gradual pacing with farce and even some meta, lots of fall-down humor with a few over-their-heads lines to grow into, Lon Chaney Jr putting maximum mustard on every line, Bela Lugosi landing on an impossible tone between florid camp and gothic dignity, a castle in Florida!

2000

★★★½ Liked 2

First time viewing for myself and the kids, after [checks watch] a decade of hearing about it from Clay Keller. Definitely a fun one — not an expert of this era of Disney but feels like an interesting crossover of the pure gorgeous artistic chops of the studio’s early 90s with a much more comedic lean. Kids loved KRONK and loved the llama. Some amazingly vibrant setpieces, like the stuff in the fast food restaurant is very Marx Brothers Looney…

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2025

★★★★½ Liked Watched 02 May 2025

Ryan Coogler decided he wanted to make a vampire action musical with a one-hour first act and two Michael B. Jordans whose costumes are Huey-and-Dewey color-coded. My lord, what an event. Not sure how it was in your theater but every Delroy Lindo line reading brought our house down. Lots to ponder in the ending. Outrageously awesome soundtrack.

2024

★½ Watched 18 Jan 2025

Hate to say this about any movie, but — it just looks cheap. Half the runtime’s in Demi Moore’s apartment. A TV network building is, like, one studio plus a long corridor. The grand New Year’s Eve finale looks like it was shot in a high school auditorium. I appreciate the reference points — Cronenberg, French Extremity, “Seconds” — and it certainly delivers on GROSS. But at a certain point I felt like Moore was performing less a character than…

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