Films I've Watched

The direction is fairly uneven, as is the editing, but this is a rare case where the story is good enough and the actors are fun enough to watch that it’s still really enjoyable. A great send up of trekies and late career television actors.

A movie that both stirs a natural joy in chaos and the warmth of found family—in Hawaii! The script isn’t perfect, but it does a great job of portraying flawed and struggling characters and showing you the value within them.

Funny and absurdist in a way that harkens back to The Hudsucker Proxy and Raising Arizona, without ever ascending quite to those heights. The characters are fun and you root for them, but the plot is less even.

More of the irreverence and silly violence you’ve seen in the previous two films, but for some reason it doesn’t quite land as well for me in this one. Maybe it’s the way multi-verses suck all the dramatic tension out of a situation. Or maybe the schtick is just wearing a bit thin. Cute dog though.

Certainly a landmark of naturalism and psuedo-verité, The French Connection is engrossing and watchable. Still, the tough guy cops with racist slurs on their lips rub me the wrong way often enough to put a damper on my enjoyment.

A simple story about vampires and how they find meaning in an eternal life. I’m sure the hoi polloi would complain that not much happens, but as always, they’d be missing the point.

Great performances, great mood, awesome music.

I saw this movie quite by accident, rashly assuming that it was the new Robert Zemeckis film whose title I couldn’t remember at the time. And it’s fair to say that I am not the intended audience for this sort of romantic tearjerker.

I have to give the movie credit for being reasonably well shot and for the actors bringing a lot of charm and chemistry that elevate the rather cliché plot. That said, I really don’t like that the moral seems to be that following the default life script is admirable and that the preservation of a woman’s breeding potential is worth her very life. Bleach.

Edward is the misunderstood, unfinished part of each of us. Burton’s hyper-suburbia is the perfect place to tell his story. Marvelous.

The scene that exemplifies this movie:

A gremlin finds a jar labeled “Acid, do not throw on face,” immediately throws it in another gremlin’s face. The disfigured second gremlin raises a Phantom of the Opera mask he has at the ready. Priceless.

Isolation, paranoia, and some of the best creature effects ever put on film. This may be John Carpenter’s magnum opus.

A movie that’s so iconic that the uneven script and rushed ending almost don’t matter. Subversive, funny, poignant, and just generally awesome. And the alleyway fight between Roddy Piper and Keith David is possibly the greatest thing in the history of the world.

One of my personal feel-good classic comedies. Delightful in every way.

A great voice cast, memorable character designs, and a willingness not to shy away from the dark and disturbing make this a really unique and enjoyable take on the classic tale. My only real critique is that it’s not very successful as a musical; the songs are forgettable and the staging of the numbers is rather uninspired.

A lively comedy of errors with some nice tap dancing numbers and some surprisingly risque pre-code elements. The direction and numbers aren’t nearly as sophisticated as Hollywood musicals would become in just a few short years, but you have to walk before you can run.

Driven by the charisma of the band, the distinctive absurdist mid-century British wit, and the timeless songs of The Beatles, this film what this film doesn’t have in plot, it makes up in charm.

Silly though the show always was, I’ve long felt a connection to Monk, this OCD germophobe who still manages to be brilliant and driven and gets the job done when the chips are down. Rooting for him always felt a little like rooting for my own ability to cope with those same challenges.

That made it pretty sad to me to see that in this return to the screen the character is at an all time low and thinking of ending it all. The mystery is classic Monk fair, but seeing him in a less desperate place would have made this a more joyful reprise.

This movie is fun to watch, with a nice twisty plot and charismatic leads. But the script is somewhat underrated and the ending unsatisfying. Not one of Linklater’s best, but worth watching anyhow.

As fun, bloody, violent action films go, this one stands out for its simple self-aware (but not self-referential) joyfulness. Like a Paul Verhoven film, but with less overt satire. The protagonists have only very minor arcs as characters, the stakes are blessedly non-world-threatening, and it’s just a hell of a lot of fun to watch Dredd fight his way through a hundred or so bad guys while never batting an eye (behind that helmet he never takes off for the entire film).

A movie that has long held an influential place in my psyche, the sheer visual imagination of Metropolis is enough to regard it as a masterwork. The layers of symbology and phantasmagorical richness make it watchable time and again.

Not as good as their first movie, but the humor is still there and I laughed a lot. Watching it was kind of like seeing an old friend—a very stupid, silly old friend.

There’s a lot of great dialogue and some really funny banter in this film. The setup is poignant, especially given that it was made during the depths of the Great Depression. I only wish the satirical theme hadn’t gotten a little lost in the last act.

Bizarre, unique, strangely funny, Kinds of Kindness is exactly the sort of film I expect to see from Yorgos Lanthimos. Which is to say, I have no idea what to expect at all. Not quite the masterwork that Poor Things was, this anthology of three off kilter tales takes you places you never expect to go and is anchored by the same few players knocking it out of the park in each one.

Not Judge’s greatest film, but certainly iconic. Oft criticized as cynical and judgemental, it’s still alarmingly apt in its satire of the worst elements of American culture.

In many ways a standard example of 50s B movies, but elevated by sound design, cinematic composition, directorial flair, and a post Hiroshima nuclear subtext. There are moments that are lyrical and even haunting in this monster-smashes-city flick.

The special effects are mostly quite impressive, with fantastic matte shots and effective use of miniatures. Except for when the miniatures are adorably obvious.