My movies 2023

We went to see "The Boy and the Heron" earlier, and we both enjoyed it, but I have this niggling feeling that I'm missing something. Or maybe I'm not, and you're just supposed to go with the flow and there's no point, per se. (It's structured like a lot of Miyazaki movies, with a big fantasy sequence in the middle, but a bit weirder, somehow. The giant warlike parakeets kind of blew my mind, but really they're no stranger than the heron, which sort of had a person inside?? - never really explained, of course!)

And then the movies below are everything I saw in 2023 before this week. I think I have to go with "Oppenheimer" for a favorite. I also liked "The Creator" a lot. (I even liked parts of "Killers of the Flower Moon" quite a lot. I just wish I didn't get the sense from all Scorsese movies that he likes the bad guys more than the good guys.)

Oh, and there was Barbie. I liked that, too. I also liked watching the women of all ages getting their picture taken inside the giant Barbie box in the lobby.

As far as the superhero movies, I did like "Guardians of the Galaxy 3" enough to go twice, but when I tried to watch it at home it just felt way too violent. I don't know why that was. (All of the GotG movies are violent but it never bothered me before!) Also, I really did like "The Marvels" and I wish they'd quit talking about it as a bomb. "Ant-Man and the Wasp" might be one of my least-favorite Marvel movies, but I didn't hate it, either. (But it's way down the list, I think. Nearly every Marvel movie of the Feige era is at least watchable, so the standards here are relatively high. It's above Hulk & Iron Man 2, for sure, & maybe Age of Ultron, too - past that I'd have to think it over!)

And then there's "Blue Beetle," which I kind of didn't know what to make of. It wasn't bad, either, though.


Seen in 2023, in a theater:
The Marvels
Killers of the Flower Moon
The Creator
A Haunting in Venice
Blue Beetle
Barbie
Oppenheimer
Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning
The Little Mermaid
The Flash
Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (twice)
Air
Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
Ant-Man & the Wasp
M3GAN

TV, and a movie addendum

I figured out that I missed a movie on my list (the updated version of which is below, again), & that was Across the Spider-Verse. I thought of it when I was making the list, and then I went, "I dunno, maybe it came out in '22" and then forgot to check that. (And only remembered to fix it because somebody mentioned it in the comments!!)

Then there's TV. The fact is that I don't watch a whole lot of TV other than news and baseball (and lately football again), but we're watching Only Murders in the Building because we have Hulu again and everybody always says it's good - so far we agree. (We're two episodes in. Nobody tell me spoilers.) The other TV I watch most aside from the stuff above is Disney Channel, mostly meaning nearly anything Star Wars or Marvel. And I'm accustomed to keeping a really good list for movies but I don't keep up nearly as well with TV. What came out in 2023, other than Ahsoka and Loki s.2? (both of which I liked a lot). Oh, I did watch Young Jedi Adventures! which was cute. If there's anything else I'm blanking out. (The 3 Dr Who specials, almost forgot that! even though we watched the last one just a couple of hours ago.)

(It occurred to me that when I said I really liked The Marvels movie, in the last entry, that it probably made a difference that I watched Ms Marvel and all of Wandavision and that made understanding The Marvels much easier! Not everybody wants to watch all of every one of those shows, and maybe the people who make the movies should take that into consideration.)

Then football - I've talked about Longhorn football already. The other football I've gradually started watching again this season is the Houston Texans, which I have not paid attention to for quite a few years, but since they have that young quarterback and are actually managing to win games I'm reluctantly back. (I'm very torn about football, generally, but I've been watching it since I was a teenager, which is actually 50 years ago now - as I discussed one day previously -  and it's clearly not going to go away depending on whether I watch or not, so when "my" teams are playing decently I generally give in and watch.)




Movies we saw in a theater in 2023:
The Marvels
Killers of the Flower Moon
The Creator
A Haunting in Venice
Blue Beetle
Barbie
Oppenheimer
Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning
The Little Mermaid
The Flash
Spider-man: Across the Spider-verse
Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (twice)
Air
Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
Ant-Man & the Wasp
M3GAN


and Rob also saw:
Dream Scenario
Thanksgiving
Five Nights at Freddy's
Exorcist: Belliever
Saw X
It Lives Inside
The Nun 2
They Live (re-release)
The Last Voyage of the Demeter (twice)
Talk To Me
Insidious:The Red Door
The Blackening
Beau Is Afraid
Evil Dead Rise
The Pope's Exorcist
Scream VI
Creed 3
Knock at the Cabin (twice)
Infinity Pool
The Devil Conspiracy