mellicious | Entries tagged with movies 2023

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.)

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

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".)

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Entries tagged with movies 2023

Movies 2023 (again)

Poor Things

Wonka, etc.

Wonka and Golden Globes

TV, and a movie addendum

My movies 2023

A lot of horror

Recovering Austinite