Here you'll find a log of all the movies I watch, with a date and a rating. Click the dropdown to see a more detailed review. This is to take the place of Letterboxd for me, because I love to track things. Log is organized from oldest to most recent.
And so my Spiderman marathon begins...
I don't have much to say about this movie. I wish Captain America and Sharon Carter didn't kiss. I like Bucky. I feel like maybe Avengers movies are worse now but they weren't amazing to begin with. I'm writing this review while watching I Think You Should Leave and I'm having a really hard time focusing so that's it from me. LOL
The last time I watched Tron I was maybe 13 or 14, and I remembered it pretty fondly. My family has an inside joke referencing the "bring out the logic probe!" line, actually. I'm happy to say that Tron holds up!
I think it's maybe not the best movie of all time, but it's definitely an awesome watch and lots of fun. It's kind of a marvel to look at, even though the graphics are outdated, just knowing how ahead-of-the-curve it was with CGI and 3D animation. The art is beautiful and so original for its time, and really worth looking into. (You can actually access the entire artbook online here.) Art aside, I wish the characters were developed a little bit more, expecially Lora/Yori, but the plot was great. I especially loved the... what shall I call it? Cyber-mysticism? Not sure... the religious aspect of the plot/world. It's super interesting, again, especially for its time.
Kaia said Tron reminded them of the 2007 Flatland adaptation, and I agree; I wonder if there's any direct inspiration there or if that was just how much influence Tron has had on scifi as a genre. Kind of interesting that they both have an almost technological Lovecraftian concept going on, where there's a scale of existence and a character goes a scale up/down and attempts to understand the world through the lens of a lesser/greater being.
And because I couldn't resist, here's some screencaps from the concept art book that demonstrate how carefully the FX team animated all of the scenes in the movie. I mean, everything was done by hand; it's incredible!
One final thought: this made me want to watch the whole Tron franchise. I might get working on that...
A dumb shark movie. I watched it while playing Minecraft. I think that it was fun, especially the plot with the kids, but I think it would've been a better movie if it just focused on one plot and developed the characters more. But also this isn't really the kind of movie you watch with the expectation that it'll be good. My life is unchanged for having watched this.
I'm... not sure why I watched this.
I definitely liked this better than Ex Machina. Watching it back-to-back was interesting; I might write a blog post about it later if I come up with more interesting things to say. Sophie Thatcher is incredible as always. I think last time I watched this movie I was too worried about trying to think of what it meant metaphorically rather than thinking of it as speculative fiction. As a spec-fic film it's pretty much everything Ex Machina wanted to be, with a better commentary on the autonomy and sexuality of it all. I loved the cinematography and the style decisions. I'm going to think on it and write more later.
Spoilers ahead. I actually had to stop watching this movie because there's an unbelievably graphic self-harm scene about an hour and a half in. (Plus, Kaia had fallen asleep anyways and I wanted to get them into bed.) The first hour and a half was interesting and maybe compelling, but it felt a little bit like misogynist torture porn. It was fun for me to think about it as a counterpart/predecessor to Companion (2025). Overall I would maybe rewatch with someone, especially to finish it, but it's not something I would watch on my own, as it's slow, tense, and triggering at times.
Update: I went back and finished watching this movie and I rerated it. (Originally it was three stars, I changed it to three and a half.) I liked it a lot better having finished it. I think the ending really made this movie. The first hour is pretty slow, but ending the movie with Ava's escape without Caleb (albeit with his help) was interesting. I'm interested in what the movie is trying to say about Caleb's role in it all--i.e. the viewer's role--and maybe his being complicit in Ava's treatment by only being interested in freeing her with the promise of a romantic relationship. I wonder if Caleb would be as willing to free Ava if she was a man, or if she was simply a gray box.
Two more things: One, I'm about to go back and watch Companion to compare to this. It's interesting that they have pretty similar concepts, but about a decade apart. I'm mostly curious to see how tech horror as a genre has changed over the years, as well as feminist horror. I think that the two movies have similar endings, if I recall correctly, so they'll be apt for comparison. Maybe I'll make a blog post about my thoughts. Two: There's a scene about an hour in where Caleb is hacking into Nathan's computer and it just shows basically Mathematica code for a quadratic sieve, which I thought was pretty funny. Nathan is supposed to be the smartest guy in the world, so the idea of him using an encryption system which can be broken with a quadratic sieve is pretty silly. Why wouldn't he use elliptic curve cryptography??? Why would he have Mathematica installed on his computer to make it so easy to hack into? Lots of very funny things here. Not important at all to the movie though. LOL.