4v291o

Like all white teens in the suburbs, I had a heavy Nirvana phase. Kurt meant a lot to sad, 15 year old me. And I truly think this is the only way you can tell that story. This quiet, meditative, mood piece that feels like half a memory. It keeps the audience at a distance, constantly reminding us that we’ll never know exactly what happened and we don’t actually have the right to know. We know too much as it is. Kurt’s gone and can never tell us and he wouldn’t even if he had the chance anyway. But the emotion GVS creates? It’s a person crawling out of their skin, desperate not to be in their own life anymore. You can feel that need to escape in your chest. It’s so palpable. It’s so familiar.

The GVS Q&A after revealed two incredible facts:
1. The yellow pages salesman was a real yellow pages salesman who wandered onto set and then they decided to put him in the movie.

2. Kim Gordon’s lines are what she wished she’d said to Kurt. 😭😭😭😭😭😭

This rating feels harsh but I think considering not a single emotional beat worked for me it might be my truth. I just wanted more. It felt completely flat. Loved the score, though. Gorgeous.

Watched on Tuesday June 3, 2025.

An incredible exploration of faith and reckoning with your own government’s capacity for harm. An all-timer performance from Jack Lemmon, too. Heart-wrenching stuff.

The world is sorely lacking in melodrama for boys! Possibly the all-time great mid-life crisis movie. Big, brash, over-the-top movie about regret and denial and a deep unease with aging.

Always hits like a freight train. It’s the best at being so clear that what the boys know is nothing. They didn’t love the Lisbon girls. How could they? They didn’t know them at all.

Hollywood used to build huge sets and just fill them to the brim with bugs! We used to be a society!!!!

The most interesting part is the relatively close perspective on the animosity between China and Japan in the years around WWII. It’s only 1960 so it simply wasn’t that long ago and Japan doesn’t really have perspective on itself here. Which isn’t a knock it just makes this really fascinating, especially since Americans don’t really learn much about it!

Also some truly incredible on location cinematography.

It’s been an exhausting month emotionally and today I felt like brains and feelings were so big and so powerful all I wanted was a movie that felt like a poem so I put this on again.

I forgot that it’s truly one of the most stunningly gorgeous films I’ve ever seen?

It pulled me outside myself into somewhere else, Tarkovsky’s brain I suppose, but also into a dream. It’s a movie I still think I don’t understand but that I can feel inside my heart.

Lately I’ve been taking every opportunity to say “Like a DOLL’S eyes” in my very best Robert Shaw impression. So far that means it’s only been 3x but I think that’s pretty good considering.

Both stars are just for baby-faced Sinatra. The movie doesn’t really make any sense at a single point in time, but Sinatra sings like 3 songs and I do like that!!

Watched on Sunday May 25, 2025.

New favorite last shot of all time. Brother, that’s a movie!

Truly insane I’d never seen this until now.

This is one of those VHS covers that’s haunted me. I’d pick it up every time I ed it in the video store knowing both that I couldn’t rent it because I was too young and that I was definitely scared to.

I can’t decide if it all totally hangs together for me, but as a portrait of New York in a specific moment in time, a compilation of vignettes and sidetracks under the shadow of a serial killer, this just feels right. Or at least it feels like Spike.

Reminds me of my mom.

We salute one of the worst movie haircuts of all time. 🫡

Could not have decided to watch this on a better day. Women that find each other and friendship through enormous amounts of play and adventure? That’s extremely my shit. Absurdist and fantastic and sweet and charming and hilarious. This thing just grabbed me by the fucking heart when I’ve been at my lowest. I love the movies.

I simply cannot imagine anyone being that horny for Matt Dillon. Body Heat for absolute dummos.

I did rewind for Bacon’s wiener tho. 
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Perfect 3-star thriller. I always think of Verhoeven as the king of movies-where-getting-shot-makes-you-explode but Bigelow really gives him a run for his money here with some of the most gorgeously stylized gunshots I’ve seen in a minute.

To say I’ve seen this movie an ungodly number of times would probably be an understatement. I how I found it (coming into the living room tuned to HBO with the movie already 1/3 of the way through and no one else watching, the TV just playing to an empty room). I bought it sometime after. I read the book. Then I read Mrs. Dalloway. I’ve played the Philip Glass score 1000 times.

Comforting to know it’s still one of the great adaptations and perhaps the best Ed Harris performance of all time.

It’s what it means to choose life over death and what happens when you simply can’t.

Would have been 3 stars if not for how much I hated the last scene.

Mostly this is just a real solid, 90s thriller with an absolutely bananas understanding of mental health. Basically everything Holly Hunter says to Sigourney is straight up crazy.

Woulda watched this on TNT on the basement TV on a Friday night in 1998 and had nightmares for sure.

Another Marleen Gorris and an adaptation of one of my favorite books to boot. It’s breezy and the day slips by the way it does when you read it, though I do wish we were in everyone’s heads more and for longer. But once you get to the final party, it’s so heart-achingly beautiful you almost don’t know what to do.

idk I think Gorris is one of my favorite directors. There’s no one like her.

HELL YEAH, BROTHER!!!!!!

For a movie forced to rely primarily on CGI, the kills in this are some of the funniest, most fun deaths I’ve ever seen on screen. Everyone is rating this TOO LOW IN MY OPINION. Have some RESPECT for this movie’s ability to shock and delight! That’s not as easy as you think!!!

Not to mention single actor is so perfectly cast it’s kind of incredible considering the franchise is built on like 2-3 able actors per movie and then the great Tony Todd for 1 scene.

This is everything I needed after the week from hell. Movies are BACK baby.

Watched on Sunday May 11, 2025.

ETHAN HUNT IS JUST LIKE ME! I’m always right and my relationship to personal safety on adventures is questionable and I love my friends sooooo much!

“While the films have never really been all that grounded (even the first one smashes a helicopter through a train tunnel), The Final Reckoning manages to be utterly ridiculous. Lines like “We can dethrone the lord of lies,” and “the total annihilation of cyberspace,” feel ready-made for mockery by the boys of MST3K or How Did This Get Made. At the same time, M:I delivers that absurdity with such deadly earnestness, you don’t really want to laugh.”

Full review: thespool.net/reviews/film-review-mission-impossible-the-final-reckoning-paramount-pictures-2025-tom-cruise/

Watched on Sunday May 11, 2025.

I had a fun time at the movies with this one, but honestly this just felt like a story I’ve seen before without much new to add. Love Rudd and Robinson, but the real notable thing here is DeYoung’s direction which I really found superb. You can see a lot of his Pen15 sensibilities coming thru in a way that really works.

I think I want to see him direct something he didn’t write again tbh!

Updated to note that cinematographer Andy Rydzewski is also a Pen15 alum! I knew it! The perfect look for this.

I can really take a “I’ll give you something to cry about!!” approach to my anxiety sometimes and this fit the bill. The setups and payoffs in this are truly masterful. No better way to leave you feeling like a husk.

Also Bostonians chime in: how high on the-most-Boston-movie list does this rank.

The god in Kaspar Ha might be a cruel one, or at least one largely uninvolved in the lives of his children. We’re thrown into a world that is strange and lonely and it’s the connections to others that build the beauty that helps us survive. God metes out punishments, earned or not, and we die and science purports to have the answer to the meaning of our lives but it doesn’t, really. We assign that ourselves.

Also Herzog did a Q&A afterward and these were my favorite moments:

“When I do some traveling on foot it’s serious”

“There are friendly silences and there are hostile silences. And there is a deadly silence”

“I always knew I was a poet”

“Filmmaking is my voyage and writing is my home.”

“If you want to be a real filmmaker you have to read. Read read read read read read read! And travel on foot.”

“In cinema some of the great films become a part of you so you will never be alone.”

That bathroom fight remains one of my favorite fight scenes in anything of all time. Lock and load those fists, Henry Cavill!!

I was not a SpongeBob person but WOW did this end up being a delight. Absurd and silly with a shockingly great sense of design and production. The David Hasselhoff cameo was tailor-made for my dumbass. A riot with the pals!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY RUSSELL!!!

A true SarahBait Western. Joan Crawford being moody and tough and every man falling over himself for her but still only half as hard as Emma clearly is. The lesbian tension!!! But add to that just some real A-tier melodrama, yearning, and some gorgeous photography of a house on fire (back when we still lit things on fire in movies like a proper country) and I’m out of my mind for this one. Plus a melancholy ass theme song by Peggy Lee?? Get OUTTA here!!

Watched on Sunday April 27, 2025.

You’re no daisy! You’re no daisy a’tall!

I wondered how this would feel on rewatch and it’s just a delightful romp! Knowing the twist only helps highlight how terribly fun it is.

I’ve never seen a collection of more absolutely hateable people in my life and the croc barely eats ANY of them!! What a waste. Like if you’re going to make me spend time with these fucking idiots can they at LEAST get eaten??? Kudos to Bridget Fonda for doing a great job playing the most annoying woman on earth I guess?

Devil Girl did nothing wrong. A perfect little schlocky B sci-fi flick where a hot smart alien wants to kill a bunch of losers and for some reason no one lets her. Her stunning robot boyfriend is so adorable I am in love with them both.

Taking off a star bc the heinous American man lives. And that SUCKS.

A small miracle of filmmaking that captured something so impossible to put into words. What it is to age, but mostly what there is to learn from a life and how much joy there is always still to be found. How much friendship and beauty. How the world is capable of giving and giving and giving and how loathe we are to ever leave it.

Nice to see Biff from Back to the Future in something else where he’s having fun but I truly wish I loved anything as much as these morons love pranks?

A truly unfathomable twist leading to a credits song that seems to be mostly played on kazoo.

What a flick!

I don’t think anything makes me sadder than the idea that most people are asleep and only a few live in amazement. Mostly because I’d like to believe that everyone makes room for amazement on a regular basis because sometimes you hear a frog or see a sunset or anything else that reminds you how very very big the world is and how very small you are within it, but not in a sad insignificant way, just in that you’re held by it. 

“Thank you for my life. I forgot how BIG.”

Sometimes I gotta just throw on one of the old go-tos from my video clerk days.

A horny musical vampire horror movie where everyone is hot JUST might save the world probably. Truly addicted to the feeling of wanting to hoot and holler after a movie. This is the vampire movie I WANT.

I like Landon, I can’t help it! This is absurd on every level but it’s mostly fun which is all the movie is trying to be.

I don’t think that view of the Smurfit-Stone building is physically possible though.

The sweet spot of terrible and entertaining. The absolute worst monster CGI I’ve ever seen in my life and some of the absolute best practical effects for a goopy, flesh torn skeleton. A real ROMP of a film for dinguses. No brain cells necessary!!

Tender and sweet and not exactly what you’d expect. Rose is more sure of herself and confident than other movies might allow and for that I thank this one. Yet another movie to make you mad we don’t have 100 more River Phoenix performances.

I forgot just how good some of the action is in this, but as with all 90s movies whose plots rely on caring what happens to the president, it feels a little quaint. 

That said, the brutality of the gun violence (which ruled) was especially surprising since I’m pretty sure we watched this on family movie night when I was 9.

“It’s hard work being in love, especially when you don’t know which girl it is.”

Took a minute to pull me in, but once it starts rolling it’s impossibly sweet. Nothing felt truer than Gregory trying to flirt in the locker room or dancing in the grass.

Watched on Monday April 7, 2025.

The whole thing is a buildup to the last 20 minutes or so which are truly insane. We wouldn’t have these problems if Denzel was in charge!!!!!

My ranking

1. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol
2. Mission: Impossible
3. Mission: Impossible – Fallout
4. Mission: Impossible II
5. Mission: Impossible III
6. Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation
7. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning
8. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

Self-explanatory.

• Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
• Wanda
• Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
• All That Heaven Allows
• Possession
• Thelma & Louise
• The Bridges of Madison County
• The Age of Innocence
• Priscilla
• A Question of Silence

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Every Super Bowl Sunday, I watch one of the longest movies on my watchlist instead. Here's what I've watched so far:

• Mulholland Drive
• Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
• A Brighter Summer Day
• Andrei Rublev
• Fanny and Alexander

Old movies that were new to me

1. Perfect Days
2. Local Hero
3. The People's Joker
4. A Question of Silence
5. An Autumn's Tale
6. The American Friend
7. Sorcerer
8. Roxanne
9. Certified Copy
10. Nosferatu the Vampyre

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Substance
2. I Saw the TV Glow
3. Janet Planet
4. Nickel Boys
5. A Different Man
6. Babygirl
7. Kneecap
8. Dìdi (弟弟)
9. Challengers
10. The Brutalist

...plus 2 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Movies to make u feel good not bad.

• Local Hero
• Perfect Days
• Magic Mike
• Magic Mike XXL
• Paddington
• Paddington 2
• Down with Love
• A Tale of Winter
• A Tale of Autumn
• Kiki's Delivery Service

...plus 2 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Not a comprehensive list of all Thanksgiving films, merely a collection of my favorites.

What makes it a Thanksgiving film? Autumn vibes. Family. Food. The Westminster Dog Show. The feeling of a gray day and a crisp breeze.

I will not be accepting at this time thank you.

• All That Heaven Allows
• Planes, Trains and Automobiles
• Nebraska
• The Daytrippers
• You've Got Mail
• When Harry Met Sally...
• Blood Rage
• Best in Show
• Knives Out
• Petite Maman

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Movies with goop

• Blood Feast
• The Wizard of Gore
• The Brood
• Night of the Zombies
• The House by the Cemetery
• The Thing
• Basket Case
• A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge
• Re-Animator
• The Fly

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Watchlist for spooky season

• Pontypool
• Dawn of the Dead
• Martyrs
• P2
• High Tension
• Celia
• The Final Girls
• Oculus
• Psycho II
• Nosferatu the Vampyre

...plus 26 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

B-horror movies are my favorite warm blanket.

• The Brain That Wouldn't Die
• The Horror of Party Beach
• The Killer Shrews
• A Bucket of Blood
• The Wasp Woman
• Them!
• The Thing from Another World
• The Alligator People
• The Black Scorpion
• The Mask

Ranking the Friday the 13th movies from best to worst as I watch them.

1. Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives
2. Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter
3. Friday the 13th Part 2
4. Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday
5. Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan
6. Friday the 13th
7. Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood
8. Jason X
9. Friday the 13th: A New Beginning
10. Friday the 13th

...plus 2 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

God bless America, I guess.

• Blow Out
• Jaws
• Do the Right Thing
• Asteroid City
• Grey Gardens
• Independence Day
• Black Panthers
• The Times of Harvey Milk
• Cape Fear
• Rollercoaster

...plus 16 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Past Lives
2. Killers of the Flower Moon
3. The Zone of Interest
4. The Holdovers
5. Asteroid City
6. Oppenheimer
7. Afire
8. Skinamarink
9. Poor Things
10. Fair Play

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Magnolia
• Safe
• Short Cuts
• Boogie Nights

• RRR
• Petite Maman
• Aftersun
• Nanny
• The Banshees of Inisherin
• Fire of Love
• Top Gun: Maverick
• Jackass Forever
• Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio
• The Fabelmans

...plus 4 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Mirror
2. The Worst Person in the World
3. Wings of Desire
4. Body Heat
5. Orlando
6. To Die For
7. Tomorrow I'll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea
8. May
9. The Heartbreak Kid
10. The Unbelievable Truth

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

These are for the lads!

• Oldboy
• Heat
• Adventureland
• Fight Club

Horror films that hit the spot when the temperature rises

• Man
• Summer of 84
• Crawl
• Jaws
• Alison's Birthday
• Tourist Trap
• Midsommar
• It
• The Wicker Man
• The Ritual

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Shoot for the moon and end up in the terrifying abyss. ✨

• Alien
• High Life
• Solaris
• Event Horizon
• Oxygen
• Gravity
• Moon
• Sunshine

A crash course for my pals new to horror who've been asking me where to start.

By no means comprehensive, a brief waltz through the decades and genres-within-the-genres of horror. Mostly just a list of personal favorites.

• Creature from the Black Lagoon
• The Innocents
• Carnival of Souls
• Black Christmas
• Deep Red
• Alison's Birthday
• My Bloody Valentine
• The Thing
• Cure
• Session 9

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Summertime
• Shirley
• The Glass Key
• Sole Survivor
• Friday Foster
• Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter
• Session 9
• Conspiración de silencio
• Mikey and Nicky
• One Cut of the Dead

...plus 4 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• The American Astronaut
• The Brain That Wouldn't Die
• Vera Drake
• Bunny Lake Is Missing
• Dead Reckoning
• Girlfriends
• Alison's Birthday
• Hangover Square
• Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II
• The Hot Rock

New and new to me faves.

• C'mon C'mon
• Pig
• Pieces
• Thief
• The Innocents
• The Vanishing
• Tourist Trap
• The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
• The Hot Rock
• Female Trouble

Homesick blues

• The Blues Brothers
• Widows
• High Fidelity
• Thief
• Ferris Bueller's Day Off
• The Fugitive
• Candyman
• While You Were Sleeping
• Hoop Dreams
• The Dark Knight

...plus 1 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Hollywood on the silver screen

• Under the Silver Lake
• The Nice Guys
• The Invitation
• Tangerine
• Inherent Vice
• Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
• Mulholland Drive
• Magnolia
• Boogie Nights
• L.A. Confidential

...plus 14 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.