Catchy Name Needed

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

Well, the last time I talked about movies here was apparently in May. (Did we go see Infinity War three weeks in a row? Good lord.) I've been keeping a list that I think is more or less complete. So here's a sentence or two about everything we've been to see since that. I feel like I haven't been going to that many movies but this is actually a surprisingly long list, so if I get sleepy before I get through this, it may end up having two parts.

(Also take it as read that Rob is going to almost all the horror movies, meanwhile. I always think I should keep track of that, too, but then I forget.)

Solo - huh, actually, I have written down "Solo x2" so I guess that means we saw it twice. I'd completely forgotten that. We didn't hate it, obviously. I didn't totally love it but I did really like parts of it. I certainly didn't think it was as awful as everybody was making it out to be. (Favorite part: Phoebe Waller-Bridge's robot)

Ocean's 8 - liked it a lot, I'm totally ready to see it again. I wasn't sure ahead of time how much I would like it but I really did. For one thing, I'm a total Met Gala junkie so I loved that part. I loved that Cate and Sandra were quietly a couple. I liked Awkwafina, I liked Rihanna, I liked all of it, really.

Incredibles 2 - really liked this, too, but honestly I don't totally remember it too well, months later. Obviously it's time to see this one again, too.

Ant-Man & the Wasp - I liked this, too. It wasn't as good as the first one but it was pretty good. (I did have a definite gripe with the Infinity-War twist in the credits, but it does make sense. It's just depressing.) I liked the woman who played Ghost, whose name I keep forgetting - and I've already looked it up more than once so I'm not going to go look it up again. (It was Hannah! and something with a hyphen! John-Kamen, something like that, I refuse to go look, seriously. I do know that she was also in Ready Player One.)

(Side note: if you're put off by me repeatedly saying, "I liked this... and I liked this too," then you're probably just never going to like what I have to say. Basically, I only go see movies these days if I'm convinced I'm going to like them decently well. If not, I just don't bother.)

Mission Impossible Fallout - we always go see these movies - at least in recent years - and I always enjoy them and then later I can't remember them at all. I don't particularly like Tom Cruise, and when they started making the MI movies with him (years ago now, I guess!) I was profoundly uninterested, and early on we didn't go see them. But somewhere along the line the reviews started getting better - I think it may have been along about #4, but it's hard to be sure since, as I said, the plots are all pretty interchangeable, and I can't tell them apart except as "the one where they're rappelling up & down the building" and things like that.

OK, I'll pick up with BlackKKlansman (I don't know if I've got the capitalization quite right on that) tomorrow.