Didn’t have much time for watching stuff the first few months of the year, so been trying to catch up with the big stuff for the past month.

Late Night With the Devil - This was the first movie I watched in like 1-2 months, so I probably appreciated it more than appropriate. Neat premise, but lazy/cowardly for not sticking to the formal idea

Dungeons & Dragons/Weird Al movies - Watched these on a long plane ride; I guess they were both fine for the occasion. The D&D one basically feels like a Guardians of the Galaxy rip-off, but not quite as bad as that sounds. Weird Al was a long one-joke skit, but the last joke was pretty good. Amicable mental landfill

Dune 2 - Actually thought the first hour of this was legitimately good, the only stretch of the 5-hour adaptation that I actively enjoyed. Most likely because it spends more time establishing the Zendaya/Chalamet relationship and feels like a more organic story. The rest of the film is too stuffed with new characters and exposition to be effective; they should have spread some of this over the first one (eg. three new waifish hot blonde women to keep track of). Anyways I think you could tweak at the edges to make these more interesting but I probably just still wouldn’t care

Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World - Really enjoyed the first two hours of this, which mostly consists of an angry Romanian lady driving around and filming filthy TikToks on her phone. The last 30-minutes is a fake “one shot” extended scene which just hammers home the themes and should have been a separate short film

Love Lies Bleeding - There’s a vogue for 90s neo-noir right now that I just can’t relate to - most of that stuff just wasn’t very good to begin with (maybe with an exception for Red Rock West). This fills that niche of western US sex thriller, but aside from the last few moments of magical realism and black comedy I didn’t find much to hold onto here

Challengers - People here are not adequately appreciating how bad the dialogue is in this - so much unnatural exposition of “here’s what I am feeling and this is my character motivation”. They really need that Reznor score to distract from how clunky it all is. That said, everyone is working overtime to make you ignore the dead weight of the source material and it was formally inventive enough to keep me invested

Furiosa - Feels like a bunch of deleted scenes. Worst of the series by far, only redeemed by the drunk rednecks behind me who kept yelling things like “fuck em up!” throughout

I Saw the TV Glow - I was a big fan of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, but this feels too schematic for me to get excited by. The director and I are exactly the same age and there’s something about evocatively portraying the American suburbs set to the music of Alex G that I can’t help but feel a connection to; the ending feels especially bleak that makes it feel like a LGBT morality play. They’re still playing it at the theater by me, after like six weeks, which is impressive for a small scale indie flick for sure

Janet Planet - Throwback to mid-00s American indie scene, like the stuff that Baumbach and Reichardt were putting out then. Plus, 16mm filmed on location in western Massachusetts, so that’s enough to make me recommend

The Beast - Riffing on the wonderful Henry James’ short story “The Beast in the Jungle”, this would have been masterpiece were it not for an hour-long De Palma/incel riff in the middle. Still my favorite thing out of this list, though

Hit Man - Love the New Orleans location shooting - including one of my neighborhood bars - but the mix here of romantic and black comedy just washed over me otherwise. I think it’s conceptually deeper than most people are appreciating; also, after Boyhood this is the second Linklater film where he uses characters as community college instructors to blatantly express the core themes of the film. An interesting object at least

About Dry Glasses - The third 3-hour film about repulsive self-loathing men in a row by Ceylan, and I’m not sure I can do another. Beautifully shot, well acted, but my tolerance for watching the machinations of a selfish pedophile just isn’t that high

The Iron Claw - Gave up on this once it was clear this was going to be a grim death march. Not my thing

Riddle of Fire - Oddball 16mm film about kids trying to bake a pie so they can play video games. Quirky in the way that makes a certain type of guy unfathomably angry, but I am Millennial enough to enjoy it

She is Connan - I stumbled across Mandico’s The Wild Boys by chance years ago and the first 15 minutes knocked me over. I’ve been trying to chase that high since then, but like with Ceylan I just gotta stop myself. Basically, a lesbian Conan the Barbarian gets manipulated by a dogperson to continually kill her past self, filmed like a decadent gay 80s action film. Probably was more entertaining to make than to actually watch