Midweek Movie Free Talk

The indie theater near me was playing The Matrix for Trans Day of Visibility!! Of course I had to watch it. Honestly it still holds up pretty well, my only main qualms are the deus ex machina a bit, and also that they kinda made badass Trinity into just a love interest. Such is the 90's I guess, but overall it's still a great movie. I can kinda see why chuds co-opted it into their red pill nonsense, but honestly chuds are kinda dumb and can't see context besides "guns cool" and such and such.

I watched two movies this past weekend: Roofman and Twelve Monkeys.

I'd been wanting to see Roofman ever since I learned they were making a movie out of this story (which I'd first read about a couple years ago and became fascinated by). I also love Channing Tatum. I'd say this is a solid 7.5. Tatum and Kirsten Dunst are great. They made some changes to the story for dramatic/narrative purposes but one change toward the end flipped the order of some events and it made Tatum come off as a little impulsive (if I'm remembering how things played out), which didn't really vibe with his intelligence that had been established consistently throughout the movie. I very much enjoyed this overall.

Twelve Monkeys is one I've been wanting to see for a while but could never find it available on streaming services I subscribe to, so when it popped up on Prime the other day, I put it on almost immediately. Wow, Brad Pitt was incredible in this. I got a little lost in the plot for a minute and went to verify something and accidentally spoiled the ending for myself, so the reveal about the zoo didn't hit quite as well as it should've, but overall I thought this did time travel really well. I started to believe halfway through that Bruce Willis really was inventing things in his brain, and so it was nice to have the psychiatrist start to try to convince him of the truth he'd been certain of in the first half of the movie. (A lot of the hitchhock references went past me, but they're clearly important with how piled on top of one another they are at the end.)

I revisited Don't Look Up last week and was surprised by how much I had forgotten and how much I appreciated it on the second watch. I don't know if it was the timing of the movie (right after the pandemic/Trump 1), the heavy-handed environmental message, or the Netflix factor that caused so many of us to move on, but I feel like it deserves a little more space in our collective cultural memory. I've seen countless references to Idiocracy as sort of the definitive satire of our time, but Don't Look Up really captures the moment. Maybe it hits a little too close to home.

I know what day it is, but does anybody want to (seriously) talk about:

Friendship (2025): ★☆☆

The cringe overpowered the comedy for me. It wasn't terrible, but it didn't click for me.

Anatomy of a Murder (1959): ★★☆

This is some awfully heavy subject matter for an old movie...

Project Hail Mary (2026): ★★☆

This was good. Not better than Interstellar, but very solid. When I logged the movie on Letterboxd, it was ranked 89th of all time between Good Will Hunting and A Separation. I know that ratings tend to start high and regress to the mean over time, but it was funny to see since I didn't think it's in that tier of great movies.

There were a few things that annoyed me, but didn't ruin the experience. My theater had a problem with the projector, so they started playing the trailers with just the sound. It's a strange experience to listen to movie trailers without the picture. There's also typical scifi technobabble about e.g. "xenonite, a metallic form of xenon," when that's not what the -ite suffix means, etc. And then finally, I noticed some of the "explain what you're doing out loud so that people on their phones can follow along" moments that briefly broke my suspension of disbelief.

When is the "amaze amaze amaze" line actually dropped during the movie? I've seen people memeing it reddit, but I don't actually remember hearing it during the movie.

Rebecca (1940): ★★☆

This was almost three stars. Maybe I need to rewatch it again after learning all the twists. It was interesting that the title character calls herself a "paid companion" without much additional explanation. I had thought that was a strictly Japanese phenomenon after watching Rental Family. Was that a known thing in the west even in the 40s?

Field of Dreams (1989): ★★☆

This movie has three fades to black! There were a couple times I got confused because the movie doesn't explain how the magic works, but I was able to catch up enough to just go with it.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie

It’s whatever man. I understood most of the references in the first one but so many of the references here were lost on me because I never got far in Super Mario Galaxy.

I kind of respect it more than I’d say they attempted to make a real movie with a real plot. There’s no pretense here. It’s literally just here’s a bunch of bullshit happening and stuff from the games so kids and the man children who enjoy this stuff (no offense) can go bananas about it. If anything I think it should have been about 20 minutes shorter giving it a runtime of 80 minutes. Make it super fast, theaters can squeeze in every more showing and boom. Probably like 10M more on the table.

So many people have been saying it’s worse than the first one. And I feel gaslit since the first one was already not good and strictly entertainment for children. It’s less coherent than the first and there’s no attempt at making character arcs. But it is what it is.

The Drama

I watched the director’s previous movie, Dream Scenario, right before this. Like a few hours before going to watch this. I thought it was fine, I remember people really loving it at the time but I couldn’t really handle a lot of the cringe comedy. And by design Cage’s character is boring, although I loved its deconstruction on Internet fame and cancel culture.

This does a similar deconstruction of American culture, in a way it reminded me a lot of Bodies Bodies Bodies and the politique of rich woke people. This was thoroughly engaging and entertaining, there’s less cringe comedy here so it’s more palatable. It never really lets up from the anxiety the characters are experiencing. And I thought Zendaya was really good in it, surprisingly since I don’t think she’s a particularly strong actress.