mellicious | Entries tagged with movies

I don't think I'll be going to any more movies between now and Tuesday night, and Rob just got home from Nosferatu, so I figure it's time to talk about the movies we saw in 2024.

I put up a list of what we'd seen in a movie theater this year a month or so ago, and I've updated it to reflect those multiple viewings of Wicked. As far as favorites, I think here I mostly have to go with the two that I saw multiple times - meaning Wicked and Deadpool and Wolverine (which I saw twice in the theater and have seen two more times on D+ so far). Other movies I really enjoyed include Alien: Romulus and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. Oh, and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, too. (I had not seen any of this new round of Planet of the Apes movies - meaning, I'd seen the really old stuff, only! - and the minute I expressed interest, Rob made me watch all three of the previous ones in preparation.)

There are another couple of movies that I know I enjoyed while I was watching them but immediately forgot the minute I got home - I'm thinking of Dune 2 and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Seriously, I can hardly remember Dune 2 at all. (Christopher Walken was in it? I had completely forgotten.)

~~I feel like~~ - no, this is far fewer movies than I typically see in a year. Eventually we figured out that part of that was the aftermath of the strikes in the movie industry a while back, which caused a lot of movies to get delayed. As you can see from his list below, Rob still found a lot of movies to see - not only horror movies, either.

(For anybody reading who doesn't already know this part: I don't do horror movies unless I'm really convinced they're not very scary - which doesn't happen a lot - and my husband loves them, so he is accustomed to going to the movies alone a lot.)

I grabbed Rob and got him to look at the list and tell me what he liked. He named five of them and so I'll put them in bold type in the list below rather than type them all out again! And he said that Nosferatu - which he just saw - was good, but probably not quite to the point of being in the top 5.

==============================================

Rob and I saw these movies together (newest to oldest):
Wicked (twice, and I saw it one more time with my sister)
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Deadpool & Wolverine (twice)
Alien: Romulus
Young Woman and the Sea
Furiosa
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
Dune 2
Wonka (which we also saw it once in 2023)

And Rob also saw (with favorites in bold)
Nosferatu
Juror #2
Heretic
Smile 2
Terrifier 3
Speak No Evil
Never Let Go
Trap
Blink Twice
Longlegs
Maxxxine
The Exorcism
The Watcher
In a Violent Nature
Quiet Place Day 1
I Saw the TV Glow
Tarot
Abigail
Civil War
First Omen
Late Night with the Devil
Immaculate
Demon's Daughter
The Iron Claw
Godzilla Minus One Minus Color
Night Swim

I realized yesterday that I hadn't gotten my sister anything for Christmas! We do what we call "token" gifts, which mostly just means small gifts, but still I didn't want to just be running to the dollar store at the last minute! ("Small" or "token" gifts still shouldn't just be random junk, either, right?) It's weird nowadays because none of the four of us (including our respective husbands, that is) are really religious or does a lot for Christmas - and we don't have parents or kids to drag us in anyway - but still, it would also be weird not to have gifts at all. We were all raised celebrating Christmas, after all. Rob and I buy each other stuff, but we do that exchange at home - we usually go and eat at their house but we don't haul all of our gifts for each other over there. (I might take something especially cute over there to show off, but a lot of our gifts are usually books and stuff so they're not all that interested.)

But as far as a gift for P, I was poking around on Amazon and they had a lot of things that still said could be delivered by Christmas, so I got her some L'Occitane hand cream, because I know that's something she'd like, and it was reasonably priced. I know a lot of people hate Amazon but I am just addicted to having everything show up at my door, no fuss.* (The BIL likes dark chocolate so his gift is always super-easy - Rob had already taken care of that part.)

*OK, mostly no fuss. I had some trouble lately with a defective Owala bottle that had a loose piece that kept shooting across the room! But we got that taken care of.

Oh, we watched Red One this afternoon. The reviews were terrible, but people who'd seen it seemed to like it ok, and so did we. Hardly a masterpiece, but it had some clever stuff in it. (I said, boy, between this and Deadpool & Wolverine, Chris Evans has been having a ball destroying his "Captain America" image lately!)

So I have now been to see "Wicked" twice - last week with Rob and this afternoon with my sister and her best-friend-since-childhood (who I hadn't seen in years and years, so that part was fun too). I enjoyed the movie as much the second time as I did the first, 2 hr 40 min running time and all. I dunno, it just works. (Hollywood Reporter says it's starting to get Oscar buzz, and I think it ought to, really.) My companions both loved it, too. The theater was pretty full for a matinee show, and it was almost all women around our age group, although there were younger people there too. Apparently Monday is Senior Day at Cinemark, which I didn't know because I almost always go on weekends with Rob.

We did actually watch "The Wizard of Oz" on Disney+ (I think that's where it was) over the weekend. We hadn't seen it in ages. I've been watching Disney a good bit lately - we are watching the series version of "What We Do in the Shadows" (and we watched the movie too, but we had to pay a few dollars for that one) and I've watched "Deadpool and Wolverine" at least twice since it's been on D+ and there's an Assembled (making-of) episode for it, too. Plus a month or so ago I went on a Disney Sing-Along tear with Encanto and Little Mermaid and maybe something else that I've forgotten. So yeah, lotsa Disney, and none of it Star Wars, amazingly. (Isn't Andor season 2 supposed to finally be along in the spring?)

I finally bought a paid Dreamwidth account - just for two months, as a trial - although it occurs to me that since I primarily post here during Holidailies (and usually just before and after) doing it for two months a year - and doing that yearly - might be a reasonable thing to do, if I'm watching my budget.

In the last entry I said I would probably have gone to see Wicked by the time Holidailies starts, and I already have - but I went with Rob instead of with my sister and her friend, and then I'm still going with them but that won't be until after the first. Actually maybe I should have anticipated that Rob would be interested because he has always liked the old (i.e., Judy Garland) version of The Wizard of Oz - we just haven't watched it in a long time. Anyway, I really liked it - the new movie, I mean - and I'm not sure Rob really loved it but he didn't complain about the 2 hr 40 min running time so he must have liked it pretty well! I liked it more than I expected to and I am happy to go see it again in a week. (I have never seen the play but I have read the book - both books, in fact, Baum and Maguire.) (And yeah, I'm aware that there are more than just two Oz books but I haven't read any of the others so far!)

Current Mood: excited
Current Location: home
Current Music: "Popular" (currently stuck in my brain)

I usually keep a running list of movies over the year, and I have been doing that, I just haven't been doing it online. (It's in my paper planner.) I actually haven't seen that many movies this year, because there just hasn't been that much to see. I finally realized that part of that probably has to do with the big strike a year or so ago, because a lot of movies got their release dates pushed back while that was going on. Rob, on the other hand, has seen a ton of movies and a bunch of things that weren't even horror movies but that I wasn't interested in. So I usually post two separate lists, one of movies we both went to see, and the other of the movies Rob went to see that I didn't. (Mostly horror but not completely!)

So here's everything up to this point. (By the time Holidailies starts I probably will have seen Wicked - my sister wanted to go, and one of her friends, so we're probably going on a weekday and Rob won't be able to go. I don't think he was really beat up about that. If it's good I'll probably be happy to go again later, anyway.)

Rob and I saw these movies together (newest to oldest):
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Deadpool & Wolverine (twice)
Alien: Romulus
Young Woman and the Sea
Furiosa
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
Dune 2
Wonka (we also saw it once in 2023, I believe!)

And Rob also saw:
Juror #2
Heretic
Smile 2
Terrifier 3
Speak No Evil
Never Let Go
Trap
Blink Twice
Longlegs
Maxxxine
The Exorcism
The Watcher
In a Violent Nature
Quiet Place Day 1
I Saw the TV Glow
Tarot
Abigail
Civil War
First Omen
Late Night with the Devil
Immaculate
Demon's Daughter
The Iron Claw
Godzilla Minus One Minus Color
Night Swim

I'm trying to figure out a top 3 movies out of my list below. I said Poor Things was batshit-crazy and somebody took that to mean I didn't like it, but I did. I liked it a lot. I feel like I need to see Barbie again before I can be sure how I feel about it, because I know I liked a lot of its ideas in the moment, but in retrospect I mostly remember all that pink and the sorta girl-power vibe. I think I said before that if pushed I'd pick Oppenheimer but I'm not really sure about that either. Boy and the Heron? Maybe. Wonka? Astonishingly - maybe. Air was good. Across the Spider-verse was good but not as good as the first one, but then again, that's a high bar. I'm still thinking this over, but let's say, tentatively:

Top ~~three~~ four movies of 2023 (in alpha order!)
Across the Spider-verse
Oppenheimer
Poor Things
Wonka

Seen in 2023, in a theater (most recent at the top):
Poor Things
Wonka
The Boy and the Heron
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

We went to see Poor Things tonight, and wow, is that a batshit-crazy movie. (But we still liked it. We liked it kind of a lot, in fact.) It doesn't really seem to have gotten a lot of publicity unless you're somebody who looks at the award nominations. I do usually look at those, but I'm not sure if that's where I got the idea that it was something we might want to see. Actually I think I saw somewhere that it was a sort of a Lady-Frankenstein plot (with Emma Stone in that role) - which I knew would appeal to Rob - and also Willem Dafoe is in it and he's always fun. One thing you should know if you're going to see it is that it's definitely an R-rated movie - not one to take the kids to. It's a HARD R. There's nudity and a hella lot of simulated sex, and it's pretty violent off and on as well. (Genre-wise, Rob and I agreed that we'd call it sort of a horror-comedy, although it's hard to pin down. It's not at all scary.)

So, I have to work the next two days, which I'm not super-happy about, but it's a short shift (like, 5 hours) so I can't complain too much. And we have to go car shopping at some point - I'm getting a new (used) car, finally! I don't know that I've mentioned this but Rob and I have been ride-sharing for several months, because my poor Toyota has 178,000 miles on it and I finally got where I was afraid to drive it around by myself at night - and since we work the evening shift that's kind of a deal-breaker. The ride-sharing worked well enough that we haven't had serious problems with it, but sooner or later there's going to be a point when we must be at different places at the same time, so car-shopping it is. We went to the credit union Tuesday and got a pre-approval so we're all set, we just have to decide on a car.

It's midnight (Sunday) and I just remembered to check and see if the Texans won, and they did. So now I'm watching the Texans play the Titans, and the Titans are wearing the old Oilers uniform, powder-blue with red trim and the damn oil-rig on the helmet, and it's kind of freaking me out. Every time I look up at the screen, I'm not sure which team I'm supposed to be rooting for. (Are there even oil-rigs in Tennessee? Honestly you don't see them very much around here any more, either, but you did when I was growing up.) (I'm sure I've said this before, at some point, but this was such an oil-rich area that that was our phone exchange, back when they still had such a thing when I was a kid - it was Oilfield-8. I think those wells must have gone dry ages ago, though.)

(Finished watching the game in the wee hours. It was pretty exciting. The Texans might possibly even make the playoffs.)

I slept very late and then we went to an early-ish show of Wonka. We both liked it, and there was even a good bit of applause at the end, so I guess most people did. I can't really say it wasn't what I expected, because I honestly wasn't sure what to expect. I had no idea if Timothee Chalamet could even sing, but he did well. I checked when we got home and it made around $40 million domestically, over the weekend, but it opened last week internationally, and with the two weeks of overseas sales it's already earned back more than what it cost - $150m total - so that's pretty good.

(Sickness update, in case anybody's concerned: I'm still coughing every now and then, but otherwise the symptoms are mostly gone. So that's a relief.)

I was poking around on Prime looking for, I don't know, a Christmas movie or something, and I ended up watching The Spiderwick Chronicles - which I know we saw back in the day, but nobody else we knew ever seemed to have seen. I didn't actually know I was hitting play on the movie at all just now, I thought maybe they made a TV series or something (they are, see below), but no, this is the movie.

We really liked it at the time, I remembered that, but it was one of those movies that vanished into the ether, as movies that don't make money tend to, and I almost forgot it existed. But, y'know, kids' movies have a way of persisting, if they find an audience, and here it is. (It's funny that I was talking yesterday about the Johnny Depp Wonka movie - which I couldn't honestly have told you the name of even though it's the name of the book - and here's Freddie Highmore, the same kid who played Charlie in that.) The animation shows its age, but it's not bad for something made 15 years ago.

(Later) Ah, ok, I knew I'd heard something about a series. Disney+ ditched it just recently and now it's going to be on Roku. I'm glad to know I wasn't imagining that.

When I was talking the other day about the movies Rob liked, one of them was Beau Is Afraid, and I had completely forgotten what it was, but I did notice that it popped up on the Golden Globe nominations, Joaquin Phoenix for Best Actor. (It's an Ari Aster movie, the guy who made Midsommar and several other movies that Rob has liked and I haven't gone to see.) (I know, I'm a wimp.*)

Also I said I forgot all about Across the Spider-verse but I noticed while I was poking around on movie websites that it made nearly $400 million domestic and is currently the #3 movie of the year at the box office. (#1 being Barbie, of course.) And while it wasn't as great as the first one - I adored the first one, I've watched it a dozen times or more - it was still pretty good. (Maybe I should go track the 2nd one down and watch it again, come to think of it!)

The reviews of Wonka are pretty good. We saw the Johnny Depp one (mostly because Christopher Lee was in it, to be honest) and I imagine we're going to end up going to see this one too. Who knew, when I was like, eight, and saw very the first one, that there'd still be Willie Wonka movies coming out all these years later?

*Certain horror movies just freak me out completely and I just go to almost none of them rather than have one give me nightmares. I don't guess that's really being a wimp. Rob doesn't seem to mind going by himself, really, anyway, and it certainly saves us a lot of money.

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

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

OK, so, I put up the list of movies we'd seen in 2023 yesterday with very little in the way of comment. This installment is about the movies that my husband saw and I didn't - mostly horror movies but not all. (One boxing movie, at least, because I don't do those either!)

Anyway, I got him to look at this list and tell me about what he liked and didn't like. He said the best one on the list is "Thanksgiving" - which as I understand it is very violent, but also funny, and might still be findable in theaters, or if not it'll be along streaming somewhere shortly, I'm sure! He also liked "The Last Voyage of the Demeter" - if you've read Dracula, remember the ship he travels to London on? That Demeter. (He said its main problem was that it was a little too long, but he still liked it a lot.) And he said "Saw X" was good, and there was one more - I think it was "Beau Is Afraid," that he also liked a lot.

And he also said his least favorite was "The Nun 2."

"Rob's movies"
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

Wow, I was freaking out because I knew I typed out this whole list of movies the other day and I couldn't find it. But it's just because I am kind of an idiot and I forgot that I wasn't logged in. (No, I don't really think I'm an idiot. But forgetful? yes.) I will have more to say about this later, but I thought I'd go ahead and throw it out there, since I don't actually have anything else ready to go.

(This week's movie: The Boy and the Heron. We have tickets for Saturday.)

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
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

I am still trying to figure out what font I am using here - this one looks awfully big but on the other hand it sure is easier on my aging eyes. Rob and I were talking earlier about Texas Chainsaw Massacre and he said that they are planning a re-release next year for the 50th anniversary. It had already occurred to me that I was in high school 50 years ago this fall ('73-74 would have been my freshman year in high school) but man, that still makes me feel really old.

I'm pretty sure that my mother said when TCM (or TCSM, depending if you count "chainsaw" as one word or two) became a big hit the next year that she was never ever going to let us go see it - but honestly I had no desire to see it anyway. I've seen bits and pieces of it but not the whole thing, to this day. (But as I've talked about before, I'm married to a serious horror afficionado, and we read the Wikipedia article together earlier tonight. I won't go see most horror movies but I'm okay with talking about them.)

Wikipedia said that the movie was filmed where La Frontera is now (in Round Rock, just north of Austin). Round Rock was a tiny little town when I lived in Austin in the late 70s/first half of the 80s, but now it's all suburbs, as far as I've seen. (The actual house from the movie was moved somewhere else in Central Texas and is a restaurant.)

Speaking of my aging eyes, I have new bifocals which cost a small fortune, but they are mostly quite effective (as they should be!) - I still have trouble with tiny tiny print, though.

I can't make up my mind whether this is an entry about Austin stuff or about aging, so I guess you're gonna get some of both. (When I lived in Austin was long ago now, after all, so it makes me feel my age, I guess!)

I have been following UT football pretty closely, this year - for the first time in some years - and the conference championship game is in, like, 9 hours. I'm pretty sure I will not be getting up that early but it should tape. Next year UT is moving to the SEC and I imagine getting into the conference championship game might be a mite harder. (UT is 10-1 and is ranked like #7 in the country. Improving further is not going to be an easy thing.) (CORRECTION: apparently I had lost count and it was actually 11-1 when I posted this, now 12-1!)

I'm thinking I like this font, so I'll probably stick with it. It looks bigger on the composition screen than it does on the display, for me. (This is what Dreamwidth calls "medium".)

I haven't posted since last December 31st, apparently, but interestingly, we were watching The Batman then, and we watched it again today. (Presumably the first time since then, it's not something we'd really watch all that often!) We also watched the Dr Who special (man, I've missed David Tennant!), part of Aquaman (because we'd watched the 1st half of it last night) and part of Green Lantern, which was just as bad as everybody always says it is. I know that's an awful lot of TV, but what can I say, it's the end of the holiday weekend and we didn't really have anything else to do today.

Anyway, it suddenly occurred to me that I haven't posted here at all in 2023, and that it was almost time for Holidailies, which I have been doing for approximately a million years. So I thought I might update a couple of times this week to warm up, as it were.

We're watching The Batman. We saw it (twice) at the theater, so that got me thinking about the movies we saw in 2022. I talked about the movies that made the most money, the other day, but I didn't talk about what I liked. As you see (further below), my list is relatively short, anyway. There just wasn't all that much that I was interested in seeing in the first place.

I narrowed it down to a smaller list, but I'm having trouble deciding on one (or even two or three) favorites, so here's the shorter shortlist, anyway:

Cyrano
Everything Everywhere All At Once
She Said
The Woman King

(Nope and The Batman were the last things I eliminated, so I guess they're the 2nd tier. And maybe Wakanda Forever and Dr Strange 2 - and oops, I forgot The Fabelmans, which was also quite good.)

I read Rob the list I had of what he saw, and he said of the horror movies, Terrifier 2 was his favorite, followed by Orphan: First Kill. And that he really liked She Said, too.

(He also just pointed out that The Batman has a really beautiful score - it's by Michael Giacchino. I had noticed the way it was using bits of "Ave Maria" here and there, but I wasn't paying that much attention to the score as a whole til he said that.)

Full list of what Rob and I saw in a theater in 2022, going backwards in time:

The Fabelmans
She Said
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (twice)
The Woman King
Nope
Kiki's Delivery Service (Ghiblifest)
Thor: Love & Thunder
Dr Strange & the Multiverse of Madness
The Northman
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
Everything Everywhere All At Once
The Batman (twice)
Cyrano
Belfast
Spider-Man: No Way Home (our third time seeing it)
Ghostbusters: Afterlife (our second time seeing it)

And Rob also saw:

Violent Night
Bones and All
The Menu
Terrifier 2
Halloween Ends (twice)
Smile
Pearl
Barbarian
Orphan: First Kill (twice)
Beast
Nope (without me, then later on with me!)
The Black Phone
The Thing (40th anniversary re-release)
Men
X
The Cursed
Scream

I'm starting to think about year-end wrap-ups - books, movies, whatever - I was looking at the list of movies of 2022 in order of how much money they made, at work last week (it was really slow) and I ended up writing down the ones from that list that we'd seen, as best I remembered. I think I caught most of the ones Rob saw, too, though.

I'm interested in the pattern of how movies do at the box office. (Rob's horror movies are doing really well relative to their budgets.)

OK, so the number in the list below is the box office ranking, as of last week. Avatar 2 could end up being the #1 movie of the year, but it isn't yet. It only has a week to catch up with Maverick for 2022 champion and that doesn't seem especially likely at this point.

Also, I'm only counting things that we saw in a theater in 2022, so for example, Glass Onion, which we watched on Netflix last night at my sister's house, isn't on my list, nor is Prey, because we watched that one at home. (I liked Prey more than I liked Glass Onion, really, although I liked them both.)

2. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
3. Dr Strange and the Multiverse of Madness
6. The Batman
7. Thor: Love & Thunder
8. Spiderman: No Way Home
14. Nope
16. Smile (Rob only)
20. Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
23. The Black Phone (Rob only)
25. Scream (Rob only)
27. Everything Everywhere All at Once
29. The Woman King
30. Halloween Ends (Rob only)
37. Barbarian (Rob only)
39. Violent Night (Rob only)
42. The Northman
43. The Menu (Rob only)
45. Beast (Rob only)
52. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
65. X (Rob only)
69. Terrifier 2 (Rob only)
76. Pearl (Rob only)
80. The Fablemans
84. Bones and All (Rob only)
88. Men (Rob only)
89. Ghostbusters: Afterlife
91. She Said
94. Orphan: First Kill (Rob only)
102. The Cursed (Rob only)
107. Cyrano
119. Belfast

The two at the very bottom are the ones that got all the Academy Award nominations last year. Well, them and Everything Everywhere. Box Office Mojo keeps talking about how that sort of "prestige movies" were doing particularly badly this year, although I'm not sure that's the term they used. (I usually call those "Oscar-bait" if I see them coming in advance.) Notice that The Fablemans is way at the bottom also (although not really at the bottom because I think there were 200 movies on the list - down at the bottom it was mostly Fathom Events and stuff like that).

Notice those three movies I mentioned a while back were totally female-centric - I believe it was Wakanda Forever, The Woman King, and She Said. Wakanda Forever did extremely well, of course, but I believe I would argue that that's in spite of it being female-centric, not because of it, and I doubt that most people even knew that coming in. It's Marvel, it's Black Panther, that's just something that a certain group - including us - goes to see automatically. The Woman King is #29, however, and its feminism is right in the title, basically, so I don't guess you can say people didn't know going in. This is probably the one that showed that people (mostly meaning men) will go see a movie with woman warriors, at least. (She Said also has its feminism in the title, but it lacks the warriors, which is my guess about why it did by far the worst.)

Note: I think I wrote this very very late on the 24th and forgot to post it!

I read a book called The Christmas Bookshop, which is a nice story about a woman reconnecting with her family and finding romance and all that feel-good kind of stuff. I like to read something like that around Christmas time, it puts you in the mood, kind of. (I also pulled out that novella that I talked about last year called "The Best Gift" and re-read it, too, for good measure.) I have some more Christmas-themed books that are new to me but it's already after midnight here and so obviously if I get any of them read this year it's likely to be post-Christmas.

We are going to my sister's tomorrow - we went to see The Fabelmans with them today but we just met them at the theater for that. I enjoyed the movie - Rob went and read some stuff about it when we got home and he came away with the impression that most of the movie is based on the real events of Spielberg's life, at least loosely speaking.

We are going to see Wakanda Forever again this weekend, and we have already negotiated with sister & B-I-L about a Christmas movie - I think we decided on The Fabelmans. (If the reviews of Babylon had been a bit better I might have lobbied for that, but 60-some % on RT? Nah. And nobody was very interested in Avatar 2!)

(Warning for the delicate, some very minor girl-talk coming below!)

So I went to the cardiologist a couple of weeks ago - just a checkup, I was born with a heart murmur so I've been going to cardiologists all my life! But my BP has been high, and I'm over 60 now and they finally put me on a blood thinner. I don't know whether to blame it on Eliquis or not but I've felt pretty cruddy all week, although of course it's the time of year when everybody is sick even in a normal year. (We are lucky, apparently RSV & this-season's-covid have not spread as badly in Greater Houston as they seem to have other places. That's not to say it still couldn't change!)

(But on the other hand... is Eliquis supposed to make your face break out? Because I have the first zit I've had in quite a few years and I'm really ridiculously indignant about it - that fucker is HUGE. That's supposed to be the good thing about postmenopause, right? a nice clear complexion, and I've had it most of the time. I don't think my mother ever stopped breaking out completely, though, so I guess I've just been lucky!)

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