The Boy and the Heron (2023). Beautiful animated as one has come to expected from Hayao Miyazaki. The story is a bit weird, but holds together and you can understand the basic motivation and emotion throughout. I am glad I was able to watch this in the theater as a lot of the visual style would just not translate on a small screen. Not his best work, but certainly not at the bottom either.
//i\\
eta: The English title really does not make as much sense or have the impact of the original Japanese.
It is rare for me to care about the ordinary, Human characters in a horror movie.
Not so, here.
They are polished, nuanced, & a bond forms between the viewer & the characters.
As for Godzilla?
Forget about all that he is defending us from worse monsters horsepucky.
Godzilla returns to his horrifying roots, as a fountain of hate & destruction.
Godzilla has, once again, become truly frightening.
My Christmas eve double feature: Mysterious Island (1961) with its great Ray Harryhausen effects and creatures and Makenna’s Gold (1969) with its fabulous southwestern locations.
A few months ago, I watched a couple of Medicare videos on YouTube. Shortly thereafter, my Amazon splash page suddenly switched over to suggesting I watch a bunch of these Tom Selleck movies about an old cop named Jesse Stone, based on some Robert B Parker books.
I laughed, and then eventually I watched them. All of them.
They aren’t very good on the whole, but I do like seeing the quaint old New England town, and the laughably stereotypical characters feel like archetypes from watching TV mysteries in the 70s.
I’m still not sure why I watched all of them, call it inertia.
I recently finished Saltburn. I haven’t decided if I like it or not which usually means I did like it but will not re-watch. There were some seriously cringeworthy moments but overall it was worth the time.
We had a long flight that had movies available to watch, and I decided on The Big Lebowski. I had never seen it before, but I knew lots of the lines from various clips I’ve seen over the years. Not really sure if I liked it or not; the Dude reminded me too much of how my brother looked and acted back then. I didn’t realize it was a crime caper, and I need to watch it again to finally figure out what happened. I knew it was a Coen brothers film, so its weirdness didn’t shock me too much.
Oh, it also has a few quick scenes of distant nudity, which wasn’t censured for the airline audience, which surprised me.
There were no child actors. They were all played by adults using Performance Capture technology, which was very new at the time. The main little boy is performed by Tom Hanks, as are most of the adult characters. Voices were added later by child actors (e.g. Daryl Sabara and Josh Hutcherson).
They fooled me. The little hero boy and girl looked very real.
Over all a nice child’s adventure story. The section where they get lost in Santa’s Elf factory dragged a bit for me. I was ready for them to meet Santa and wrap it up. Perhaps edit out 10 mins. YMMV
Would you like to see a romcom with big laughs, romantic chemistry between the leads and catchy songs? Then go rewatch The Wedding Singer because Marry Me fails on all three measures. Very few light chuckles, a lot of terrible songs (including one which appears to just be the word “church” repeated over and over with rewarmed “Like A Prayer” staging), and no real connection between the two leads other than that they’re both nice. Oh so nice.
In fact the whole film basically appears to be a propaganda piece pushing the message that even though Jennifer Lopez is fabulously rich, famous, talented, beautiful and influential, she’s really just like us. Sorry, Jenny From The Block, but no. This is just desperate and sad.
In better news, Maestro absolutely kicks ass. Normally these vanity projects are tepid nonsense (looking at you, Kevin Spacey and “Beyond the Sea”) but Bradley Cooper has nailed this not only with his portrayal of Leonard Bernstein (which is a touch over-manic at times but less than you’d think if you know anything about the real Bernstein) but in the writing and direction too. A lot is left implied without either whitewashing or being vague, and you really get a sense of the man without having to be shown every moment of his life. And it’s a two-hander, with Carey Mulligan as Bernstein’s wife Felicia also delivering an excellent performance.
Also: if you can see this in the cinema you absolutely should, because the sound mixing is amazing (and I say this as someone who generally doesn’t notice that sort of thing). The blending of the endless music, the dialogue and little background noises (traffic, birdsong) is brilliantly done. But if you can’t or don’t want to see it there, I would recommend it anyway.
Watched The Santa Clause - the original that has spawned myriad sequels - for the first time since its release in 1994. Tim Allen become the new Santa, kicking and screaming at first, when the old one falls off his roof and dies. *
The Santa Mythos parts are fairly charming, but I was surprised how much of the story is divorced parents squabbling over child custody, and how a child’s fantastical stories of traveling to the North Pole with his father are disbelieved by all the adults…which is a problematic idea these days. If I were remaking it today I’d ditch the kid entirely.
*In Noelle on Disney+ the job of Santa is a hereditary position. Anna Kendrick gets it when her father dies of natural causes.
I haven’t seen it yet but intend to. The draw for me is that it was written and directed by Emerald Fennel, who previously wrote and directed Promising Young Woman (2020). I thought the latter was an absolutely superb film, and I was gratified that it was nominated for Best Picture and disappointed that it didn’t win. I gather Saltburn isn’t up to that standard but I’m curious to see it.
Thanks for the recommendation, looking forward to seeing it. Unfortunately it looks like it just opened in theaters so it may be quite a wait to see it at home.
Some Christmas movies I watched (and one non-Christmas):
Candy Cane Lane
Eddie Murphy’s new Christmas movie. It starts out like it’s about lawn display rivalry, and then becomes a weird magical chase movie, and doesn’t seem to have a clear moral at its heart. It was fun and funny and works fine for what it is, but it left me unsatisfied.
Your Christmas Or Mine
This was from last year (there’s a sequel out this year, I didn’t watch that yet) starring Asa Butterfield and Cora Kirk who end up going to each other’s family homes for Christmas to surprise the other, and there they learn a lot about the secrets each were keeping. But it’s very light hearted and quite entertaining.
Dashing Through The Snow
Ludacris discovers Santa trapped in his neighbour’s chimney, and ends up on a wild chase through the city. It’s pretty standard as an idea, and a lot of it doesn’t make any sense, but it’s a fun ride as it goes.
Chicken Run: Dawn Of The Nugget
Not a Christmas film, but a recent release from Aardman. Ginger and Rocky’s daughter Molly goes on an adventure out into the unsafe world and ends up in an even bigger and more complex chicken farming facility. The usual Aardman humour and creative action sequences, all fine family fun. Some of the voices are recast but you can barely tell, they’re a good match.
We watched Leave the World Behind today.
Not a typical Xmas feel-good movie.
It was a decent thriller, with a lot of suspense and weirdness. I’d give it a solid B.
Just finished watching Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny which remains a stupid title. As closure for the film series it wasn’t bad, there were a lot of fun action sequences, and I like Phoebe Waller-Bridge in general but the climax was decidedly anti-climactic. I mean, they spent the better part of two hours trying to doing the time travel thing and then it was just basically “Welp, here we are in ancient Greece. Time to go home again.”. I suppose I should be grateful that they didn’t go for the “Enemy’s face melts off” ending like films 1, 3 and 4 but still, it felt a bit perfunctory.
Saw Ferrari in the theater today. A strangely abrupt ending, brutal both physically and emotionally.
After dinner at home we put in a DVD of the animated Disney movie Planes. My husband had picked that up out of a bargain bin ages ago and we just never got around to watching it until today. Utterly predictable but very cute.
I tried with Maestro, I really did, but only managed about an hour. Maybe just not my type of film, but in that hour I don’t remember anything happening whatsoever. That being said, Cooper was extremely convincing (even if I had no idea what Bernstein was like in real life, I bought him completely).
