Wednesday, December 6, 2023

The Outsiders and Cat's Cradle

Read The Outsiders as reference for a writing project. I think we read a tiny excerpt of it in my 8th grade English class then watched the movie. The book was pretty great, honestly. Tragic. 

After Thanksgiving I picked up a book from my TBR shelf and sat down and read it pretty much all in one go. It's remarkable how you can just forget that it's possible to sit down with a book and read. Cat's Cradle was funny and sad and wonderful and terrible like all the other Vonnegut I've read.

Friday, May 6, 2022

Venom and Dune

 I saw the second Venom movie around Halloween at a drive-in theater. It was neat and I liked it, but not as much as the first one.

 I saw Dune at the drive in! That was not a great way to see it!

Tuesday, May 25, 2021

Snowpiercer

 I've been meaning to get around to Snowpiercer for years and I'm glad that I finally did.

Maybe I'd let the hype build up too much in my head or maybe I'd just seen the "I know what people taste like" scene lauded too many times, but that was actually kind of underwhelming.

The big train car hatchet fight was not underwhelming and was totally worth the rest of the film, but also the whole thing was just really watchable and engaging and extremely funny in places?

There was maybe a tiny bit too much melodrama in some spots, but overall it was great. 

Also it was just a visual treat from top to bottom. The grime was extremely grimy, the decadence was extremely decadent, the gore was extremely gory. I'm down. Looks great, fantastic. Would watch over and over and over again.

Knives Out again

 I watched Knives Out another time and enjoyed it again. Apparently there's a sequel in the works, and that's nice. I'd like to see more of Benoit Blanc, Daniel Craig clearly had a lot of fun with the character and is just fucking fantastic to watch.

Good shit. This is a perfect chill out on sunday with some cocoa and a dog and a blanket movie.

Midsommar

 I think there were three or four people who told me "I hated this movie but I think you'd really like it" and they were correct.

I really, really liked Midsommar.

I thought the film was beautiful and the gruesome visuals were arresting and memorable in a way that I know I'll be thinking about for years. I understood both why Dani would be so seduced by the cult and why it was so frightening that the cult was seducing her. Christian is delightfully shitty and the constant low-grade background horror is very artfully done.

I particularly liked the hallucinogenic dilation of the flowers on the May Queen crown and the background effects of melting skylines and twisting trees that made the unreality so pervasive.

I am super into this movie. This is a good movie. I like it a lot.

These Final Hours

 I watched this on Prime with my husband about two weeks before my husband was hospitalized and waitlisted for an organ transplant.

It's a very, very depressing movie and was really depressing to watch at that time specifically.

That said, I enjoyed the conceit and I think the movie did a LOT with its tiny budget. It was intricate and complicated for something with such a simple premise ("what if the world was ending today, no ifs ands or buts").

It's a movie I'd have a hard time recommending to someone unless I knew what specific flavor of weird they are, but if you like both Harold and Maude and Mad Max there's a decent chance you'll enjoy These Final Hours.

Birds of Prey

 So this is like a year late but whatever, pandemic.

I liked a lot of this movie, I liked the art direction. A year later I remember a lot of the visuals and a lot of the plot but not much of the dialogue, which always kind of bums me out.

I found the actions sequences really disappointing in the way that I do with a lot of modern action choreography. 

But overall it was plenty of fun and I'd happily throw it on in the background while I was crafting or something. It wasn't a bad movie by any means.