psocoptera

Sinners, 2025 film. Damn this was good. A rare theater outing and very worth doing so. Perfect movie to see the day before going to a folk festival, too. ;)

River, 2023 film written by Makoto Ueda and directed by Junta Yamaguchi (who I keep mispronouncing like the military government rather than, you know, a Japanese name, argh). Utterly delightful movie. I like time loops as a trope and all the very different things that you can do with them, and this is such a clever, high-energy take. Highly recommended, available with Prime Video if you have that. We did have one little problem with the subtitles lagging and slowly falling further behind but it was always pretty clear what was going on.

Suzume, 2022 animated film directed by Makoto Shinkai who directed Your Name. Ordinary girl stumbles into magical adventure involving mysterious older boy, talking cat, and doorways to elsewhere, while roadtripping through different parts of Japan and contemplating abandoned and destroyed places. I really liked it, although not quite as much as Your Name - visually gorgeous, interesting in little glimpses of Japanese life, some unexpected plot directions. I wasn't sure I had the cultural literacy to understand the significance of some ritually-spoken lines that kept repeating, and I had only a vague guess (which turned out to be right) about some referenced events that would probably be basic to any Japanese person, so doing a little reading afterward deepened my appreciation of the movie, but I enjoyed it a lot even without that, recommended if you ever like this sort of thing at all.

Finally watched the new West Side Story. I really liked some of the things they did with it! The whole backstory for how Chino has the gun, that it's Riff that brings it into the story, and the reimagining of "Cool" as this struggle between Riff and Tony. The deeper exploration of the racism against the Puerto Ricans, from the paint vandalism to the anthem to "America" to all the times people do or don't speak Spanish or tell other people not to speak Spanish. Tony's backstory and Bernardo calling him out on the way he may be using Maria to try to reinvent himself. And I grew up with the Symphonic Dances so I will always enjoy this music, most especially "Mambo", although nothing is as good as an orchestra sitting playing in their formal suits all earnestly shouting "mambo" at the right time, like, the music might be doing the mambo but *you* sure aren't.

On the other hand, I could not believe how catastrophically they blew the climax of the whole show by giving "Somewhere" to someone other than Tony and Maria and forcing Maria to do some other weak-ass reprise as Tony dies. That's the big emotional moment! Why the hell would you pull the teeth of your movie like that?? I mean, presumably either "because Rita Moreno wanted a big number" or "to not feel like they were just copying the 1961 scene" but I feel like you watch a production of a known show because you want to watch that show, and directors playing games with which pieces you get has a high risk of being disappointing unless they really have something interesting to say with taking key bits away.

Finally saw The Marvels, yay! I thought it was a lot of fun, which was what I was looking for - chances for the characters to have some good moments and to see how they all interacted with each other. Honestly, so much of all of these superhero movies for me is how much I want to spend more time with the characters. I haven't seen the latest Thor or Guardians or Doctor Strange (except the alternate universe scene) because I just don't like or care about any of their main characters that much. (Except Groot, who doesn't like Groot.) But Carol, Monica, *and* Kamala? Heck yes! Spoilers ( Read more... )

Nope, 2022 movie. I really liked this - smart and gripping and original. The first of Peele's movies I've watched without reading a synopsis first, and it was just fine for my level of horror-aversion. Reminded me of Green Knight in some ways, tonally and in some of the use of imagery, although Nope is definitely more coherent/traditional in how everything eventually adds up where Green Knight was more surreal.

I suppose I can rank Hugo movies now, behind the cut. ( Read more... )

I also watched Hidden Blade, 2023, which I had failed to see in the theater, which turned out to be just as well, since by renting it streaming I was able to watch it once through, read some stuff, go back, watch most of it again, read some more stuff, and watch some scenes an additional one or more times. I mean, I really liked it, but the combination of nonlinear storytelling and my own illiteracy made it a challenge! For context, this is a Chinese spy movie about Chinese resistance to the Japanese occupation. My relevant history classes were a long time ago, and while I remembered the basics about the Communists, Nationalists, and Japanese, I had definitely forgotten most of the specific names, years, cities/regions, and progression of events that get referred to, and I never had the visual literacy to, like, quickly recognize uniforms. And my monolingual ears don't even pick up the difference between Chinese and Japanese (really different languages!) unless I'm paying very close attention (definitely not on a first pass while reading subtitles), let alone the differences between Mandarin/Cantonese/Shanghainese (much less different, to my untrained ears, at least), so, all of the information and characterization being conveyed by language choices was flattened in the English subtitles. (I suppose really good subtitling could have used different colors or fonts or italics or something...)

Anyways, I found the whole process of figuring it out and then catching new details on the second or third watch very satisfying, and this is very much a movie about gorgeous people wearing gorgeous 40s costumes having psychological drama at each other (punctuated by occasional violence and war atrocities), so it was also a treat just to spend more time looking at them, even if I wasn't also looking at the complicated and subtle things people were doing with their facial expressions. It is definitely from the Chinese Communist perspective in the way that many American spy thrillers are from the American perspective - the Communists are the heroes here - which I thought was interesting (I'm not sure I've ever watched a spy movie where the leads weren't American or British? maybe I'm forgetting something?) but might be off-putting if you don't want to compartmentalize it from the wider context of shitty things the CCP has done (the same way you might compartmentalize an American spy thriller from the shitty things the US has done). For me, I already agreed with the POV of this movie that the Japanese invasion was horrific and the Chinese were the right side of that situation, and I don't really feel strongly about Communists vs Nationalists but was willing to go along with "these characters believe that what they're doing is right and necessary and given the information they have in this time period that's a reasonable belief". (Interestingly, the movie (at least from what I could tell) mostly stuck to saying critical things about the Nationalists rather than positive things about the Communists - I guess it would be fraught and complicated to have characters, like, talking up Mao, but slamming Chiang Kai-shek isn't going to wade into any contemporary muddy waters.) I definitely don't have the literacy to think in any serious way about where the characters might be in 10 or 20 years, re the famine and Cultural Revolution and all that. I bet there's some fascinating fic out there in Chinese...

Nimona, 2023 movie. We watched this, so I should write it down. For me it was a case of an adaptation surpassing the source. Spoilers ( Read more... )

Avatar the Way of Water. Watched for Hugo purposes. Definitely would not recommend unless you have some sort of reason like that. My god was that movie long.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever at home, finally. They did such a good job with it, I really liked the choice to make it Shuri's movie (and Letitia Wright really carried it) and they made such good choices about how they used Boseman footage. And it just continues to blow me away how these movies have more depth and substance than anything else in the MCU, which, like, I don't need or expect every Marvel movie to do that, I like them when they're just fun too, but it's impressive to be reminded that they can.

Across the Spiderverse IN THE THEATER, which I haven't done since February 2020, but this was clearly the movie to make an exception for. (Plus the small theater at Fresh Pond is only 50 people max capacity, and wastewater rates look low right now.) And it was just astonishingly good! Like, every scene, they were just like, how can we make this striking? how can we make this excellent? how can we push this? A bit more behind the cut: ( Read more... )

Has been brought to my attention I never wrote up either of these here. For the benefit of my future self going through my tags, I liked both - Turning Red was my favorite Pixar movie in awhile, the boyband stuff was so spot-on, and Ms. Marvel was so fun.