Category: Uncategorized

  • Double Feature Streaming & Movie Pass Adventures: The Lego Movie (2014) and Final Destination Bloodlines

    A cropped version of the skull from the poster for Final Destination Bloodlines altered to look like Lego pieces.

    The Lego Movie

    part of the face of Vitruvius from The Lego Movie, eyes glowing, with other Lego figures partially visible behind him.

    I had never watched this, even though I’d heard tons of great reviews for it. But this was the last week of school and I needed something to entertain my students while I cleaned and finished grading, so I put this on. Even with sort-of knowing most of the story, it’s still pretty great.

    This fake poster is based on the real poster for the other movie I watched today.

    A poster for The Lego Movie mimicking the poster for Final Destination Bloodlines

    Final Destination Bloodlines

    Two women screaming in Final Destination Bloodlines.

    After work I had a little time to kill (ha!) before going to a retirement party, and Final Destination Bloodlines fit the extra time nicely. I’ve never watched any of this series, but I knew the basic concept. Does this movie make any sense? No. Did I laugh a lot? Oh, yeah. It does the same “violence so extreme and silly that it becomes a live action cartoon” thing as The Monkey.

    My first plan was to copy The Lego Movie’s poster for this movie’s fake poster, but that thing is really complex, so I did a quick Lego effect on the featured image instead. You probably won’t have any trouble figuring out the actual source poster.

    A poster for Final Destination Bloodlines mimicking the poster for Barbie.
    Fediverse reactions

  • Movie Pass Adventures: Friendship

    The chests of Tim Robinson (wearing a puffy brown jacket and holding up awhite styrofoam cup with a red straw) and Paul Rudd ( wearing a blue and red jacket and holding up a large mushroom) in the movie Friendship.
    A large, charmingly smiling, blue-hued face of Paul Rudd looms behind a small, awkwardly smiling, red and yellow hued Tim Robinson (who is sitting, leaning forward, with his hands in his lap).

    If you’re looking for a movie where your date curls up against you to try and hide from the film, skip horror movies and see this! Then enjoy 100 minutes of cringing.

    Holy cow, this was painful to watch but irresistible- and much better than the last Paul Rudd A24 movie I saw.

    Today’s poster was easy to the point of plagiarism (“let’s copy the look of one poster with images from the real one”) but too perfect to deny.

    A poster for Friendship mimicking the poster for I Love You, Man.

    Fediverse reactions

  • Movie Pass Adventures: Better Man

    A chimpanzee that's also Robbie Williams looks out and to his right. Next to him his manager does the same.

    When the trailers for this first started showing up I said “I would have to hear a LOT of good reviews before I’d see that.” Then I heard a lot of movie folks say they like it, and that there was at least one scene- the “Rock DJ” number- that needs to be seen in a real theater to be appreciated. So I went.

    It’s not very good.

    Vera Drew’s Letterboxd review explains perfectly why they went with a CGI chimp instead of a person: “How else are they going make the most unlikeable character in bio pic history someone you wanna watch for two hours?” He’s a jerk through 99 percent of the film, and his big transition to slightly less of a jerk starts with him blaming his problems on getting fame as a teenager. It’s also pretty funny that he spends most of the movie wanting to make his own music, but the big standout song is from a band he seems to hate, and the redemption song at the end of the movie is a version of “My Way.”

    Lazy joke poster below.

    A lazy poster based on the first poster for Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Mostly a very dark brown- nearly black. In the center, thewords "BETTER MAN" are written in the traditional thick Planet of the Apes font. the letters are filled with the face of the chimp that's supposed to be Robbie Williams.
    I went through the trouble of finding the Planet of the Apes font, but wasn’t even enthused enough to add the credit block from the original poster.

  • Not-Quite-Retro Movie Pass Adventures: Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016)

    Conner 4 Real's upper torso, wearing a green and white letterman's jacket with a white C on the left breast.

    After watching Barb & Star yesterday, this feels like a trip to the frat house. It’s somehow dirtier, but with less sex. Funny, but much more caustic.

    I saw this at an Alamo Drafthouse “Sing Along Party.” It was… odd. I think they had someone watching and turning on closed captioning whenever they thought a song would start. Sometimes the lyrics wouldn’t show, but the dialogue would. Maybe it was supposed to be a Joke Along Party as well.

    I will not tell you how long I spent trying to make the letters on this poster look right. I thought I’d save time so I made a custom brush and did it in Illustrator. I probably could have neatly written it on paper and scanned it in half the time. And it’s still not quite right- but close!

    You may find yourself doing the donkey roll.

  • Streaming Movie Adventures: Frida

    Frida Kahlo's eyes

    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!

    Fediverse reactions

  • Movie Pass Adventures: All We Imagine As Light

    All We Imagine as Light movie bar

    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:

    A poster for All We Imagine as Light inspired by the poster for Anora.
    Maybe she also speaks Russian?

    Fediverse reactions

  • Movie Pass Adventures: The Room Next Door

    A horizontal slice of Tilda Swinton's face, showing her right eye and the right side of her mouth, from The Room Next Door

    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.

    Oooh! A new thing I’m doing!

    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:

    Fake movie for "The Room Next Door" in the style of the poster for "The Room."
    “Oh, hi Martha!”
    Fediverse reactions

  • Legitimate Stage Adventures: Dear San Francisco

    Someone at this show was seeing it for the tenth time. This was a lot of fun, but it’s not a “ten times in three years” show. What subtle nuances did you miss the first nine times you watched people jumping through hoops and climbing on poles?

    Definitely worth seeing at least once, though. I said “wow” a lot.

  • Movie Pass Adventures: Nickel Boys

    Cropped frame of Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson of Nickel Boys looking at a mirrored ceiling.

    The Tree of Life came out in 2011; I didn’t care for it. The whole “Brad Pitt whispers Meaningful Sentences Over Beautiful Images” thing made it feel like a long and expensive version of “Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey.”

    This movies starts with similar beautiful but disconnected images, all shot in first person point of view, and I was afraid I was in for Deep Thoughts Redux. But the movie actually uses the starting scenes to teach you how to watch it, then trusts you to understand the story without having the leads narrate all of their feelings. And when the camera’s point of view shifts from one character to two, the movie takes a moment to teach how to watch the new style, while also using the moment to give some character moments for the two leads.

    One of my favorite movies of the year.

    Fediverse reactions

  • Very Retro Movie Adventures: The Gold Rush (1925)

    The Gold Rush movie bar

    Continuing my personal “I can’t get to the theater so I’m watching really old stuff” festival. I probably haven’t seen this movie since I took a film appreciation class at Pierce College in 1984, and it was old then. Now it’s coming up on a century, and it still holds up. It’s amazing to see how much of a blueprint this was for future comedies.

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