Tiny technical correction – the movie actually spans the period 1957-58. It’s sad but magnificently done.
Coup! (2023) on Hulu (I think)
It’s 1918 and the flu pandemic has isolated the family and small staff of an estate owned by a wealthy but progressive muckraker journalist. The new cook (and suspected killer) played by Peter Sarsgaard teaches his hypocritical employer a thing or two about the illusory nature of social class. It’s a good film but I found the conclusion outraging
Bottoms
This is one of my daughter’s favorites and we watched it last night. I thought it was very funny and had kind of a Heathers vibe though Bottoms doesn’t seem quite as dark and is more of a wackier, satirical movie. Marshawn Lynch is hilarious as a teacher who barely cares.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vH5NAahf76s&ab_channel=AmazonMGMStudios
Wit (2001). A very unusual HBO production made for television. Emma Thompson plays a professor of 17th century English poetry who is diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. She is admitted to hospital for 8 months of intensive in-patient chemotherapy. The movie alternates scenes of her treatments with lengthy soliloquies in which she reflects on her situation and on life and death in the poetic imagery of John Donne.
A stellar performance by Thompson and a very powerful film that won an Emmy for Outstanding Television Movie. Directed by Mike Nichols and co-written by Nichols and Thompson. Highly recommended with one important caveat: this may be the most depressing movie you’ll ever see.
More or less depressing than Grave of the Fireflies?
I’d say Dear Zachary equals Grave of the Fireflies. Come and See is close as well.
I haven’t seen this, so I can only speculate, but I would think it’d be a lot harder to be deeply moved by an animation than by an exceedingly well made action live-action movie, especially for someone who doesn’t particularly enjoy anime.
A great deal of what makes Wit so powerfully moving is Emma Thompson’s stunning performance. She is a smart, strong-willed independent woman who is gradually reduced to a frightened, trembling creature devoid of agency, her body ravaged by pain and her organs starting to fail one by one as her body shuts down, even her hair gone from the effects of chemo in final twist of cruelty, looking more like an abandoned doll than a human being. It’s both profoundly sad and compelling as a brilliantly conceived story, and at its core is a parable of life and death.
I’ll quote Ebert:
OTOH, you’ve been known to vehemently disagree with Ebert! 
We all have different tastes, and that’s fine, but I’m sorry, despite the reputation of Studio Ghibli, anime just doesn’t do it for me. I’m not averse to excellent animation, as I noted just upthread about Flow. I was glad to see it win the Oscar this year for Best Animated Feature. But it didn’t make me misty-eyed the way Wit did.
Plane 2023 Gerard Butler and Mike Colter
On Peacock
It’s not an inspiring title. But the film is pretty interesting. A passenger plane in a storm is forced to land on a rebel controlled Philippines island. The Captain (Butler) and passenger (Colter) seek help and have to avoid the rebels. The rebels want to take hostages for ransom. Naturally there is plenty of action.
I recommend it. Gerard Butler is very good in action films like Olympus Has Fallen and the two sequels.
Presence (2024). I like the occasional horror movie and this one was in the “haunted house” genre which seemed promising.
But the only thing horrifying about this disappointing waste of time was the horrible nausea-inducing cinematography, as if everything was filmed with a handheld camera with a wide-angle lens that followed everyone around, up and down stairways and from room to room. Very little happens that’s of any interest, including the ending. The script feels like it was written by a high school student as a class assignment.
But here’s the kicker. Imagine my surprise as the credits rolled to see that this amateurish disappointment was directed by Steven Soderbergh, Oscar-winning director and winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or, and director of such classics as Erin Brokovitch, Traffic, the “Ocean’s” trilogy, and many others. He also most recently directed Black Bag, which I haven’t seen yet but which at best has mixed reviews.
Wow – this felt like he was phoning it in, maybe literally. Definitely not recommended.
IMDb: 7.0
Metacritic: 85
Rotten Tomatoes: 96%
Popcornmeter: 70%
Those are pretty good scores, especially the critics.
I really liked Presence.
Yes, I should have just said “mixed reviews”. Not all critics liked Black Bag although most did, and audiences were somewhat more mixed, with polling by CinemaScore giving the film a “B” and PostTrack audience polling had just 51% saying they would “definitely recommend” it. I’ll opine on it when I see it.
Returning for a moment fo Presence, I note that this also got pretty good reviews, but I absolutely stand by my opinion that it was a disappointment, the cinematography was just awful, and the script was amateurish. I admit to being astonished that the screenplay was written by David Koepp, a well-regarded screenwriter who also wrote the script for Black Bag and for many acclaimed films, including Jurassic Park which I consider to be perhaps the most perfect movie ever made, at least in terms of visuals and pure entertainment! How Koepp could produce this drivel I cannot understand. I guess even the best artists can have off days
So did a lot of critics, apparently, though it scored only 6.1 on IMDb, which I still thought was way too high. My problems with it were already stated. Compare this with a really good haunted house story, The Haunting – the original 1963 version with Julie Harris and Claire Bloom, not the terrible remake. The screenplay was adapted from the acclaimed Shirley Jackson novel, and was not just scary in the true “haunted house” tradition, but psychologically very insightful.
Within the last 3 nights I’ve watched two Korean movies that I really liked:
The Witch Part I: The Subversion , and The Witch Part 2: The Other One
You have to like government conspiracies, SciFi, and Asian action movies, which are extremely violent. Part I also has a tremendous twist in it that I never saw coming, and Part 2 left open the possibility of a third and final movie.
It may not surprise you to learn that this is based on the stage play of the same name, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It played on Broadway with Cynthia Nixon in the lead role.
And Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House.
One of my coworkers, a stress engineer, note that it is the first (only?) film to feature a stress engineer as the hero.
I commented that, were it remade, it would star Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts. Then I realized that, in its own way, the original already did!
I love the film, watch it all the time.
But it makes no damn sense!
Grave of The Fireflies is powerful stuff, but I can’t help think they didn’t have to [spoiler]. The writer didn’t in the same situation. They could have went back to the family.
Smithereens
The story of seeing this last night is possibly more interesting than the movie itself. Last year, I discovered a pop up movie venue that played cult films on the first Monday of the month. I took my teenager to see Rock and Roll High School and Suburbia there (and I really regret missing out on seeing Burst City). We haven’t been able to get there yet this year but I saw they were playing Smithereens and my wife said she wanted to go. My daughter was in town as well so we all planned to go to the show, though my wife dropped out last night because of work related reasons.
I drove my daughter and teenager to the venue and when we went in, there was a different event being held there so I went through my emails from the movie club, found their website (it was very minimalist and DIY) and found that they are in a new venue. So the kids and I hopped back in the car, drove the 20 minutes to the new location and got there after the movie had already started. The folding metal chairs were not very comfortable and the screen was too close, but the popcorn was tasty and we had a good laugh about the adventure.
Smithereens is about a runaway named Wren who tries to become a figure in the New York punk scene but she’s kind of aimless and doesn’t know how to do it. Along the way, she gets kicked out of her apartment, gets involved in a number of parasitic relationships, and helps a musician steal money so they can run off to California. He leaves without her and she tries to rekindle and on-and-off again relationship with a friend living in a van but she ends up missing her chance with that as well.
It’s an interesting watch, imo. It’s not a complicated story and the acting isn’t the greatest but the gritty drama of a young woman trying to find herself and making mistakes and wrong choices along the way makes an interesting story.
I remember when that was hot indie for a New York minute, for various reasons, but I never got around to seeing it. How was Richard Hell as Eric? I was always curious if he was able to act…that’s one of the only roles he ever had.
No one would accuse him of being one of our age’s greatest thespians but he’s fine. I think he’s basically playing himself.
I did see the movie last year on a streaming service. I believe it was Tubi but I’m not 100%.