A lovely film about food and love. Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel have great chemistry together, and Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire has a huge career ahead of her. PREDICTIONS: best foreign film and cinematography nominations. Don’t go when you’re hungry.
…and while I enjoyed this movie a lot, I probably didn’t appreciate this movie as much as I would have thanks to issues completely beyond the control of the film.
Issue one: The Taste of Things is a movie takes its time, letting the audience quietly observe as incredible meals are meticulously and lovingly created. That’s great, except I saw Perfect Days, an even more quiet, meticulous and loving exploration of one man’s life, yesterday. In comparison, The Taste of Things felt action packed.
Issue two: the woman who thought that standing in the hallway where she couldn’t see the film meant she could talk on the phone and the audience wouldn’t hear her.
Bonus Movie: The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
I like Wes Anderson’s short films better than his full length features. All of his flash and affectations get time to shine without getting too tedious. This is an odd duck, though. It’s sort of an illustrated reading of Dahl’s short story. Actors play multiple roles, and it makes no attempt at realism. Has Anderson ever directed an actual play? I wonder if he’d be good at it, or lean too heavily into actors facing the audience reciting their lines. PREDICTION: Won’t win best short this year.
My Movie Stats
Counting shorts, I have seen 24 films this year. That’s 3.36 films a week, or one film every 2.08 days.
Oscar-nominee specific stuff:
Every best picture
4/5 Best Actor (I’ll get you, Colman Domingo)
5/5 Best Supporting Actor
4/5 Best Actress (well, 4.25 out of 5, since Katherine watched Nyad and I was in the room for a lot of it)
3/5 Best Supporting Actress
5/5 Director
2/5 Animated Feature, but I plan to watch Robot Dreams this week
Maybe I’ll actually watch the Academy Awards this year. I haven’t done that since dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
Ah, the Fifties: when aliens so advanced that they can travel thousands of miles between seconds can be defeated by guys driving trucks with weapons they built in two months. When people could be followed by a flying saucer on Monday, and not mention it to their army general father until the next day over dinner. When spacesuits that scientists claim they are unable to to damage can be pierced with bullets. When a vital part of communicating with aliens was have dead batteries in your tape recorder so the alien voices would slow down. When most of the world moved at 24 frames per second, but spacecraft moved at 12. When a woman would expect credit for her work, but proudly demand to be called “Mrs. Doctor Russel A. Marvin.”
I’m so glad we’ve left all this behind and moved into the unassailable logic of movies like Argylle and The Beekeeper.
Also: The lead scientist is named Dr. Marvin, and I kept waiting for Dr. Marvin Monroe to show up.
If you’re looking for a slice-of-life movie about a charming toilet cleaner going through his very structured daily routine that isn’t a comedy and is (except for about a dozen words) entirely in Japanese, then you should see this film. You should also see it if that isn’t something you thought you wanted to see. All of the cast is strong, but Koji Yakusho is the soul of the movie. He’s on nearly every frame of the film, and his performance never falters.
I declare this movie A Wimmer! (that’s what the cool people call a Wim Wenders movie that’s a winner)
I saw it again, this time with friends and a bigger audience, and it worked much better. Still not a great film, but much more fun. If you’re going to watch it, do it with as large of an audience as possible.
A misfire, but much less of one than I expected it to be.
It’s set before Peter Parker’s birth, so it’s full of “let’s talk about Spider-Man without talking about Spider-Man” moments. My favorite was when a character said “when you accept responsibility, you will gain great power.” I also enjoyed when someone said the bad guy was “like some kind of spider… person.”
Some really rough dialogue, slippery motivation, disappearing characters, dropped plots, and misguided fan service.
Still, I officially declare this movie Better Than Morbius. maybe let it play in the background while you’re doing housework.
Also: The IMAX poster is way cooler than the standard ads. Look at this thing:
Bonus Movie: The Last Repair Shop
Are short documentaries about people who fix musical instruments for LAUSD students supposed to make me cry? And then cry again while talking about it? Because this one did. A pretty straightforward talking heads (and playing heads, I guess) short film. The score was surprisingly distracting for a movie about giving kids the chance to expand their lives with music- until the end, when it suddenly clicked for me and I retroactively appreciated all of it.
I thought of a far-too-mean opening paragraph for this:
“The good news: I’m confident Lisa Frankenstein will not be the worst movie I see this week. The bad news: tomorrow I’m seeing Madame Web.”
Lisa Frankenstein is not a particularly good movie. It’s trying really hard to be “John Waters directs a Tim Burton film,” and it doesn’t quite work. But it does feel like it’s trying to be something different-but-accessible, and sometimes that works.
Someone online wrote “this is the kind of movie that people will appreciate in five years.” I don’t know if that’s true, but I could see this becoming a movie that spawns a thousand TikTok clips (or whatever the 2029 equivalent of TikTok is). I do know that I saw it for free on a weekday afternoon and didn’t feel regret that I’d spent a couple of hours in a theater with it. Let’s see if Madame Web can manage that!
This year I’ve decided to get as much as I can out of my AMC monthly pass. To break even I have to use it to see an average of one and a half movies a month. So far this year I’ve averaged seeing about 2.6 movies a week in total, with about two a week at AMC, so I’m ahead of the game for now.
Here are those movies in order of viewing, and some probably dumb comments about them that I’ll be paraphrasing from my letterboxd comments. Assume I liked the movie unless I say otherwise.
Wonka
Surprisingly fun. We get to find out how Wonka learned the value of slave labor. Bonus: It’s part of the current Stealth Musical trend!
Ferrari
Somehow managed (with the exception of one horrific scene) to make the racing scenes the least interesting part of the movie. Adam Driver is fine, but Penelope Cruz says more in fifteen seconds with her eyes than Adam Driver does in five minutes of talking.
The Iron Giant
How to make me cry at a movie:
Hire Vin Diesel.
Only use his voice.
Have him slowly say three syllables.
In Guardians of the Galaxy the syllables are “We are Groot.” In this, the syllables are “SU-PER-MAN.”
American Fiction
I wish I could write bestselling novels as a joke.
All Of Us Strangers
Probably the best depressing yet uplifting family drama romantic ghost story full of steamy sex I’ve ever seen. Probably.
The Book of Clarence
This movie couldn’t pick a lane. Sometimes it was The Life of Brian, sometimes it was The Last Temptation of Christ. Very watchable, great performances, but jarringly uneven.
32 Sounds
It looks like a documentary about sound, but it’s secretly a completely different thing. Unlike The Book of Clarence, the tonal shift in 32 Sounds absolutely works. See it if you get the chance.
The Zone of Interest
Crushing. A haunting look at the hideous banality of evil.
Godzilla Minus One Minus Color
Much to my surprise, Godzilla Minus One was one of my favorite movies of 2023. This version is edited to remove the color- not just be desaturating, but adjusting individual brightness & contrast of colors in each scene. Some of it works better than the original, but for the most part I thought the color version worked better. Still great, but not as great.
Argylle
This movie was dumb fun. It’s not great, it makes no sense, and if you like spy movies you’ll probably guess all the twists, but after a week with The Zone of Interest it was exactly the stupid fun movie I needed.
Anatomy of a Fall
…and back to the serious stuff. Excellent performances in a mostly-realistic presentation of an investigation (even though the solution is much more obvious than the movie wants us to believe). BONUS MAESTRO LINK: Featured role for Snoop!
Killers of the Flower Moon
If you need a man to play an evil dullard, you can’t go wrong with Leonardo DiCaprio. And like Penelope Cruz in Ferrari, Lily Gladstone is brilliant at communicating without dialogue.
The Beekeeper
Things I rarely like:
Action movies
Jason Statham movies
Movies with heroes that are always right
That said: I loved this movie. Nothing but wild nonsense. HE PROTECTS THE HIVE!
Maestro
I loved the stylized first half, but grew less interested as the film became more grounded (Katherine felt the opposite). Bradley Cooper is very good, but Carey Mulligan outshines him. Hmm- that’s three movies where I thought the female costar outperformed the male lead. Maybe there’s a message in there somewhere.
This was the last of the Best Picture nominees I hadn’t seen. This is the first time in 25 years I’ve watched all of them.
Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths Part 1
This one’s just for the comic book nerds (like me). It uses The Flash (not last year’s nightmare model) as a focal point, and it’s fun if you know the characters, but regular humans would probably get distracted by character overload and zone out. Plus, the animation style reminds me of the Venture Bros, which automatically dropped my ability to take this seriously by at least 28 percent.
Sometimes I Think About Dying (2023)
…and Sometimes, I Think About Dying (2019)
I saw the full-length movie with Daisy Ridley first, then came home and watched the original twelve minute short. The basic story is the same, but the viewer’s way into the mind of Fran (the main character) is very different. The movie has the luxury of more time, so it can let us discover her feelings slowly through abstract images and dreams; the short doesn’t have the same time for subtlety, so we get narration. I liked the movie more, but that could easily be because I watched it first.
I should probably do this more often with fewer films so people don’t wander off mid-post.
Less than 24 hours ago I posted a collection of some of my favorite movie scenes, and it quickly became the most popular piece of media ever created. I was nominated for twelve Pulitzer Prizes and three Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards, and I was declared President of the Earth and Related Planetary Systems.
So here are a few more.
The jury from 12 Angry Men (1957).
Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday (1940).
Some movies are so momentous that they are forever burned into the collective consciousness. Here are a few I appreciate. Every time I see them I find something new.
Orson Welles in the famous campaign scene from Citizen Kane(1941).
Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray in a scene from Double Indemnity (1944).
Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh in Psycho (1960).
And a more recent film, the modern classic Spotlight (2015).
Do you like movies? Really? Then name seven of them.
