Do you know what the wildest part of this movie is? This:
Things this movie has in common with Poe’s story:
Things this movie does not have in common with Poe’s story:
It’s fun to see Lugosi and Karloff in the same film, and to see Lugosi is a (kind of creepy, but still mostly) good guy, but good golly this movie is silly.
Speaking of silly, here’s this movie’s really dumb poster:
The buzz about this movie was stuff like “Pamela Anderson’s greatest performance! Incredible!” That sounds great until you remember that she’s never been known as a great actress. I don’t mean to sell her short- there are some scenes where she is absolutely riveting- but they are surrounded by acting that ranges from “okay” to “bewildering.” Jamie Lee Curtis is strong, as she always is when not terribly miscast and slogging through dreck. But my favorite performance was from Dave Bautista, who gets to play small and subtle. I’m really glad he’s been able to somehow avoid always being cast as “Large Angry Fighting Person.”
I started making fake posters this year so I could use them as replacements on Letterboxd, but the site where they draw posters from is cracking down on fan art, which means this is the last one you’ll see on Letterboxd (and it will probably disappear from there). The good news: you’ll still see them here! Another great reason to visit my blog!
My students have raved about this movie for decades. Decades! I always thought “I’m sure it’s good, but I’m too old to enjoy it.”
It’s wonderful. I’m not sure how a movie that starts with almost twenty minutes of people moving into a house is so charming, but it was absolutely captivating. The animation works so well that I found myself thinking “that girl is really good; I wonder if she made other movies.” Not if the voice actor had done more work- if the animated girl had continued her acting career.
That’s two kid movies in a row that I watched and enjoyed after years of people saying “watch this – you’ll enjoy it.” Maybe it’s time to accept I should finally watch Paddington 2.
All my silly posters can be found here: https://letterboxd.com/dogwelder/list/movies-i-watched-in-2025/
At least, they’ll be there if they don’t get mysteriously pulled.
I really thought I’d seen this one already, but as I was watching today I realized there were huge chunks I didn’t know at all. I’m glad I gt to see this in a theater, because this movie is big and bright and has ALL the colors. It’s not afraid to be a giant cartoon. It’s smart enough to know that a race movie needs lots of car crashes, but takes advantage of cartoon reality to make sure no one dies. Everyone in an crash gets wrapped in magic safety bubbles or just happens to have a parachute.
But the best part of the movie was the woman sitting next to me who could barely contain her excitement. If a tenth of the people who saw this when it came out loved it as much as she did, this thing would have made a zillion dollars.
![[br]okosz](https://media.social.lol/accounts/avatars/109/433/564/679/275/674/original/12f674152cc52aeb.jpg){kind=small}
The 2024 documentary, not the 2002 movie.
I think this would have worked better as a book, where they wouldn’t have been afraid to let Frida Kahlo’s art stand on its own. This documentary decided that nearly every image of her work had to be animated and color graded to match every other image, breaking the composition of everything she made. She complains at one point that a French artist wants to display her work with junk he bought in street markets in Mexico; I wonder how she would have felt about her work in this.
But hey, I got a pretty good poster idea!
I thought I had this whole movie figured out from the trailer. I did not. I mean, everything I expected to happen happened, but not in the way I expected.
That was a weird sentence.
Fascinating power dynamics and an incredible performance by Nicole Kidman.
…and the Letterboxd movie poster special:
Sure, it’s racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic (“it was a diffferennnnt tiiiiiiime!”), but if you can see past that, just underneath is a thoroughly stilted and unfunny film. I do thank it for being mercifully short, though.
This movie’s poster:
It’s not great, but it’s not much worse than the real poster I based it on:
I should have made Leslie Nielsen more orange and been more careful with the white space around the logo. Too late – not going back.
This movie is on the shortlist for best international picture. It takes place in India, so naturally it’s being submitted by France. I had a hard time connecting to this at first – possibly because my old man ears struggled to differentiate the voices of the three leads, or possibly because I might have a cold coming on – but eventually my brain figured it out and I locked in (as the kids say).
So, good, but be ready to focus on dialogue processing unless you’re familiar with the 23 official languages of India.
This movie’s “attempt to be confusing” Letterboxd poster:
I forgot how good this movie is. Malcolm McDowell 110% charm, which he needs to be to make a brutal thug like Alex a protagonist worth watching.
Now I need to find the full version of “I Want To Marry A Lighthouse Keeper.”
Today’s poster:
My first movie of 2025!
…and it’s not great. This is Pedro Almodóvar’s first English language movie; maybe the rhythms of English don’t flow as naturally for him, and it’s effecting his directing and editing. Lots of stiff exposition, including a couple of scenes with dialogue so hamfisted that people laughed. Still, it’s mostly Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, and they’re often watchable.
I track the movies I watch on Letterboxd. When I log a movie, I can accept the default poster, choose one of the available alternates… or UPLOAD MY OWN. My goal this year: create technically accurate but misleading posters for every movie I see. This is the first one I’m posting:
