I actually find that movies interest me a lot less than good TV shows. Movies are like short stories. I like short stories once in a while, but they don’t really develop the characters or story very far. TV shows are like proper books.
I’m a bit of the opposite. A movie is a one night commitment. A TV show is several weeks committment since I don’t binge as fast as a lot of people do.
Also, movies tend to have bigger budgets so better overall production, though not always.
My movie watching has also declined to almost zero as it just isn’t compatible with having a toddler in the house and thus having little free time during which I’m also very tired. One major problem is that I hold movies in such high esteem that I feel I need to watch them in one go and with enough attention to really do them justice, which just isn’t possible.
I cannot stand episodic TV at all and instead I find myself watching a bunch of shorter youtube vids with almost no lasting value. I guess I’ll have to try to lower my standards a bit and allow myself to watch a movie in parts, as this should still be more fulfilling than aimless browsing and youtube.
I don’t watch very many movies anymore, but it’s mostly because there aren’t that many I give a shit about seeing. I did just watch Little Forest - Summer/Autumn, however, and found it delightful. Still need to watch Barton Fink.
Have you tried checking the 20:20 Film Quiz Thread? Tons of great recommendations with some extensive write ups in there. And I hope you’ll like Barton Fink, which happen to love but at the same time it’s probably a Marmite movie that won’t work for everybody.
Watched Where The Wild Things Are (2009 - Spike Jonez) as a library DVD rental with my son.
It’s pretty good. The titular Wild Things are emotionally complex, sad, and broken. It’s not a utopian world. It has that indie vibe in spades.
The faces of the monsters live in an uncanny valley, and here it works to great benefit. It had been 10 years since I had seen it, but it had aged well to me. My 6 yo seemed to connect with it as well, and it was neat to see him tackle a film that didn’t water things down.
From the middle of 1999 through about 2004 or 2005, I lived in Bellevue, WA and had a group of friends where we got together every weekend, and we went to see a movie in a movie theater, and rented about 2 movies for home viewing on DVD.
What I quickly learned was that when you watch 52 movies in the theater every year, you have watched most of the good stuff that comes out at the box office. And so the selections from the video store get harder and harder, especially when you’re trying to pick movies that 4 or 5 different people have not seen.
In that situation, even after exhausting movies that one or two people might have already seen, you start feeling like you’ve definitely already seen everything in the Blockbuster video, and you’ve mostly seen nearly everything at the Hollywood Video stores. That’s when disc netflix came along, and that changed a lot. Suddenly we were watching lots of movies that we had missed. And then I moved to Kansas City away from those friends, and I’ve seen very few movies in the theater since. But I still got into the habit of hearing about a movie, watching its trailer, and thinking in the back of my mind, assuming that of course I’ll watch that movie eventually, because of course, I will watch all movies eventually. That’s what it felt like when we were watching 52 movies in the theater every year, and at least 150 movies at home every year. It felt like eventually we would get to ALL the movies.
I do miss that.
Polygon always has lists, and they’re usually not very good, but this one surprisingly is (though it misses a couple of good ones):
It includes “She Dies Tomorrow”, a film about which Tom said, and I quote, “Ha ha, you watched She Dies Tomorrow”.
So is The Hunt actually good then?
It also includes the Eurovision Song Contest movie with Will Farrell. I was under the impression that it was universally panned, so I was really surprised to see it on that list.
I came home one day to find my girlfriend and her dad watching that. They were about an hour in and then just fast forwarded to the big ending number.
They watch a lot of, ahem, movies and television that…they apparently like, so this one has to have been pretty bad.
Polygon also recently published a list of “kind” movies, and the Eurovision movie was on that list. I suspect tastes vary and this list is more a compilation of various people’s tastes than a consensus view of a bunch of people. I guess I appreciate that.
At the very least, I appreciate that they have two movies on there from Apple+, a service I had for almost a year now, on which Ted Lasso is still the only good thing I’ve seen on it. Hopefully these two Apple+ movies are as good as they say.
DANG IT, Wolfwalkers is on Apple+! Trying very very hard not to buy into another streaming service. Ted Lasso was tempting me, but Wolfwalkers might at least get me to jump through the hoops for a free-trial-and-binge. Boy’s Town (which I’d also been hoping to see for awhile) will be a bonus.
For All Mankind is a really good show. Long Way Up is also pretty good.
That was a good list, thanks! I didn’t know Tasha Robinson was a contributor – I’ve been following her writing since SciFiWeekly-dot-com and the glory days of The Onion A.V. Club.
Summary:
Rentals: Another Round, Wild Mountain Thyme
Amazon Prime: Small Axe (five films about West Indians in London), Sylvia’s Love
Disney+: Soul
Netflix: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
HBO Max: Let Them all Talk, Wonder Woman 1984
Apple TV+: Wolfwalkers
Last Saturday on NPR I heard this interview with Mads Mikkelsen and Thomas Vinterberg, the star and director of Another Round. It really made me curious. But I’ll wait until the movie gets to a streaming service rather than rent. There’s already too much to watch.
Their last collaboration (The Hunt, 2012) was wildly successful, IMO…probably my favorite movie of that year; certainly Top 5, anyway. So I’m definitely up for whatever this turns out to be.
I can’t tell if we really have hit the apocalypse of cinema or not. Maybe I’m just watching really bad stuff.
Fatman - I enjoyed this. It’s dark and not for everyone. Goggins and Gibson are definitely collecting a paycheck for this one but I had fun.
Boss Level - I love the idea of this and Joe Carnahan but other than a couple of interesting deaths, it completely fell flat for me. It has some heart, but video game characters have way more dimension than anyone in this. Not much new here. It feels like it could have been a great action film but comes off like a low budget made for streaming film.
Synchronic - interesting idea, typical sci-fi indie promising more than it is going to deliver very predictable. Still I think worth watching. I don’t think Mackie hurts or saves the film.
Jumbo- Haven’t seen this and it seems very…well French. The trailer was interesting enough but the Money Shot oil in the face completely made me feel like I was watching an SNL skit.