Posts about Movies (RSS, JSON)

6AM — The weather is miserable, it’s the middle of winder, it’s cold and wet. The light is bleak, although the movie is shot in colour, it feels like a black and white movie. There’s snow. These are the conditions where just want to get on with things and go back home. And so does this movie. It gets on with it, no fluff. The story unfolds quickly and straightforwardly, there are no distracting love interest, and very little dialog. Every word spoken is important. Not banter. No one speaks during the heist. This is my kind of heist movie. Who needs Ocean’s 11 to thirty-nine, if you’ve got Melville’s Red Circle?

12PM — Those were the days; when bored rich men would develop elaborate ploys to rob a bank, and then fall in love the with insurance investigator hired by the bank to recoup the money. A lot less damage done than today’s Thomas Crown, who would probably force his way into politics hoping to replace government with an AI.

11AM — I don’t have much to say about Bullitt. Not because this was a bad movie. I spent 113 minutes being bedazzled by Steve McQueen’s impeccable style, which is why I need to keep this short. I’m out shopping for a turtleneck jumper and a brown blazer.

5PM — This has all the ingredients for a good old-fashioned film noir. A struggling main character, the good guy chasing the bad guy through a series of tunnels, the light always throwing oversized shadows on the walls, and a twist at the film’s end.

When I learned that large parts of Guilty Bystander were shot on location, I hoped for some nice shots of 1950s New York. But I realised when you tell a story in 90 minutes, there’s little room for filler. No time for extensive drone shots with dramatic music or long-winded pan shots. Today’s movies are full of these, that’s why it’s hard to find a contemporary movie that’s shorter than two hours.

9AM — Imagine this for second, considering our day and age: Two journalists with a spine and real conviction, unravel scandal in a government’s highest office, and follow the story for weeks until it is completely and truthfully told and the responsible people are held accountable. All this with their editor’s support, who do not think to that the other side needs to be heard or succumb to the pressure of the twenty-four hour news cycle.

Imagine that. Functioning journalism.

5PM — First Cow is an anti-western, one that depicts life in the frontier but with no masculine energy whatsoever. There are no chases on horses, shoot-outs or high-noon stand-offs here, just two friends trying to get by in trying circumstances. While the approach is refreshing, the story also lacks a climax or any character development.

7PM — This is an immensely disturbing horror. But it’s also a portrait of a man from the fringe of society who has never experienced affection, compassion or love, who finds himself day in and day out drinking in the company of other lonely people.

4PM — Another Christmas movie, this one very Australian. Christmas with the ungrateful, dysfunctional family in a hot, unspecific Australian suburb. A father of three beats up one of the in-laws and goes to prison where he finally faces the demons of the past that messed him up, psychologically speaking. It’s a dreadful, anticlimactic film that I couldn’t recommend any less.

1PM — The manager of a big New York department store channels the spirit of Christmas and sales go through the roof. In the end she gets the guy and a big bonus. She can finally afford that big house in the Hamptons where they all live happily ever after. It’s most American of Christmas movies.

10AM — That voice. That nagging inner voice. The voice that tells you you’re not good enough. Not at your job, not as a father, not as a husband. Micheal Keaton does a great job portraying a man wrangling with his life choices, an angry and depressed man in despair. The almost constant drum beat adds to his stresses.

11AM — Throughout her life, Lee Miller was fashion model, fashion photographer, surrealist artist, war correspondent, and cook book author.

This is her story, told in a straightforward way without many twists or big surprises. A clear start and end. If you’re vaguely familiar with Miller’s career you could be tempted to say it’s boring. Nell Minow, writing for Roger Ebert:

It is more about “then this happened, and then this other thing happened” than who Miller was, why she did what she did, and how it affected her.

But that’s what you get when you don’t fictionalise someone’s story or add excessive Hollywood pomp. It’s makes this kind of movie, the bio pic, better and more realistic. By just focussing on her time as a war correspondent, the film shines a light on Miller’s most important work as journalist. And you still get that claustrophobic feeling she must have felt in the face of the horrors of the holocaust.

Seeing Andy Samberg, who I’ve only ever known as a comedian, in the role of David Scherman, Lee’s travel companion through a war-torn Europe, was … surprising. Like when Adam Sandler did Uncut Gems, my first thought was “is this going to work?” It did with Sandler but not so much with Samberg. He just can’t shake that characteristic smirk from his face. Even in the face of abhorrent crimes he always looks like he’s just step away from making a silly remark.

12PM — After a gruesome induction to the Marines, we follow a group of soldiers to Vietnam. Masculine banter and excitement for a pointless war ensue until they get caught in an ambush.

I hadn’t seen Full Metal Jacket before for some reason. Great movie, no notes.

2PM — You can depict drug addiction from the perspective of an outsider in a moralising way: Look at those people and their miserable lives at the edge of society. Pay attention in school, learn a profession, find a well-paying job. Don’t become one of them.

Or you show their human side, which they have despite the crimes they commit, as a tight-knit group of friends, family almost, as they try to navigate their lives. “Drugstore Cowboy” does the latter, which is why it’s so good.

Robert Ebert:

This is not a movie about bad people, but about sick people. They stick together and try to help one another in the face of the increasing desperation of their lives. The movie is narrated by Dillon, whose flat voice doesn’t try to dramatize the material; he could be telling his story at an AA meeting. He knows it is sad but he also knows it is true, and he is not trying to glamorize it, simply trying to understand it.

8AM — This isn’t the right time, I find, to watch a movie about an American strong man building an inventory of fingerprints of anyone he deems “communist” and who deports adversaries for no apparent reason other than the fact that they are adversaries. Let alone one that is strutted with talent, yet so boring. So boring, in fact, that I fell asleep half way through.

5AM — Everyone says it’s a classic. It’s got Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in it, after all. But god, Casablanca is a dreary and soppy affair. What do we think will happen once Ilsa Lund enters the scene with her husband looking for kind papers that Rick Blaine came into possession just moments earlier? Surely, Blaine isn’t gonna flog them off to the highest bidder.

3AM — Dosed with a bottle of Bourbon. Spent the night in prison and appearing before a judge, energetic, well-rested, not a trace of a hangover. Several days on the run. Tangled up in a murder conspiracy. An adult sleepover on the night train. Chased by a crop duster, spraying him with 1950s cancerous pesticides, forcing him to hide in a ditch. No shower for days. Yet, Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill still looks impeccable. The suit maybe a little dirty, but not a single crease. The hair immaculate, as if it is a LEGO wig.

As a man in his early forties who works from home and doesn’t wear socks on most days, I’ve got to ask myself what I can do to look more like Cary Grant?

1PM — Admit it. You’ve watched The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross at least once, staring at the screen for an hour, mesmerised by what is unfolding before our eyes. Soothed by the gentle voice of Ross‘ instructions. Maybe you were slightly intoxicated at the time after consuming recreational drugs at a friends house.

There’s also a good chance that, given the state you were in, you and your friends started meditating about this man. Who is Bob Ross? What’s he like, off screen when he’s not painting? And if you were young, still a bit juvenile, you might have discussed how he must be incredibly successful with the ladies. Just look at his hair. And how he‘s driving an orange van, no the colour is Tangerine, and how he takes his latest score to his favourite spot near the shore of a lake surrounded by rolling hills covered in green canopy. And at some point, someone said, guys, guys, you know what, this should be a movie. And thus, the idea for Paint was born.

Paint isn’t about Bob Ross, but it’s fair to say Carl Nagle, the public-television painter played by Own Wilson, is very inspired by Ross‘ appearance and disposition. It’s an entertaining movie, not great, not bad either, funny now and then but not too silly. Watch it on a grey Sunday afternoon in February to cheer you up when you need a little colour in your life.

5PM — The Royal Hotel has to be added to the curriculum in film schools; as a reference for awful writing.

Two free-spirited woman having the time of their lives backpacking and partying in Australia. Until they run out money. And because Sydney is renown for the lack of casual job opportunities, they have no choice other than accepting a job in an outback pub. Of course the pub’s patrons are all men; all with a juvenile sense of humour, most of them covetous, some outright predatorial.

You know where this goes but I bet you didn’t expect that the women’s saviour shows up at dawn, out of nowhere, at exactly the right time. What was he up to since he left the pub earlier? Was he lurking around in his car? Was he drunk-driving through the desert for hours? Could he smell the danger? We don’t know, but it’s not important because we’re closing in on the ninety-minute mark and the film must end soon. And it soon does when the two women set this temple of misogyny on fire. They walk off as the hotel blazes fiercely in the background. The symbolism!

5PM — Soldiers convicted of serious crimes are sent on a special mission behind enemy lines to infiltrate a meeting of Nazi generals. In preparation to the mission, they build their own camp in a field. At some point they stop washing. The only time they see women is when the mission commander organises a couple of ladies of the night for a sweet send-off. The majority of the men die honourable deaths during the mission.

What a manly movie. It makes you want to move to Alaska—alone—to work as a lumber jack and kill bears with your bare hands.

8PM — If Chinatown were made today, the majority of the two-hour runtime would be car chases, fighting and sex scenes. But we only get the occasional kerfuffle and one kiss. Polanski instead uses the time to tell this story set in 1930s Los Angeles about greed and corruption, where money means all-encompassing power. It feels uncomfortably relevant.

5PM — Teenage magazines in the nineties had questionnaires in which the reader could test how strong the love from their current suitor was. Needless to say these tests weren’t very accurate, which most girls in my school found out when they realised that their interest moved or that being two years older and owning a car aren’t predictors for personality.

In Fingernails, it’s the Love Institute that lets couples test whether they are meant to be together, but only after a series of exercises meant to build affection between couples. These exercises aren’t much different from what you would find in a relationship self-help book; the logical continuation from those tests from teenage magazines.

Jessie Buckley is great, as always. But Fingernails is too long. The message, you’ll find love when you least expect it, becomes clear quickly when you realise where the movie is headed. There’s a very boring slump in the last third, where the story just doesn’t progress.

5PM — If Psycho was released today, it would be classified as a thriller not a horror. By today’s standards, there aren’t make-up and cuts that make you jump in your seat to justify the “horror” label. Yet, Hitchcock managed to create a scary atmosphere in the movie, mainly because of Anthony Perkins’ disturbing portrayal of Norman Bates, but more so because the events could unfold as depicted in Psycho, and it could happen to anyone. This is the main differentiator to more modern horror movies set in an unrealistic realm—you walk away thinking, “it’s just a movie.” That’s not the case with Psycho.

8PM — Is this a comedy, a horror, a western? A bit of everything, and utterly rubbish. Seeing how trashy it is, Bone Tomahawk is probably a favourite amongst twenty-year-old, weed-smoking frat boys.

5PM — You know you’re watching a great movie within the first minute of “Killers of the Flower Moon.” The scene is perfect; the camera, the music, it all sets the tone for the film.

You see the oil bubbling up in the prairie early on, like some misplaced witchy cauldron. As the oil begins to gurgle and then to gush, it splatters a half-dozen Osage men who’ve started to dance ecstatically at the discovery, their bodies slicked with petroleum — a harbinger of the blood that, as Scorsese reminds you in this heartbreaking masterpiece, has long engulfed us all.

“Can you find the wolves in this picture?” The premise of the story is established quickly. White people are the wolves in this picture, who moved to Osage County after Oil was discovered. Many are entrenched in the murders of Osage people. Local doctors who first provided lethal substances that slowly killed Osage people and then covered up the murders with fictitious death certificates. The local town sheriff is paid to turn a blind eye to certain dealings. The thick but handsome Ernest Burkhart who loves women and money. But the biggest wolve is William King Hale, the slick cattle ranger portrayed by Robert DeNiro, who is friendly with everyone but manipulative and ruthless.

This is an overwhelming movie. It’s long. Its set design and camera are perfect. The performances by DiCaprio and especially Lily Gladstone are stellar. The unmediated display of cold-blooded and subtle violence leaves you distraught.

“Killers of the Flower Moon” is a magnificent picture. Even at the age of 80, Martin Scorsese outclasses pretty much any director active today. There aren’t many that make movies like him.

12PM — I re-watched “Being John Malkovich” after a long time; what a brilliant, surprising and witty movie it is.

Charlie Kaufmann, the screenwriter, deservedly received a lot of credit for the brilliance of this flick. I find it equally astonishing that the film was directed by Spike Jonze, who previously was behind the television milestone “Jackass.” (Granted, he also directed the video for Beastie Boys “Sabotage,” arguably the best music video ever made.)

9PM — It’s easy to see why 2001: A Space Odyssey didn’t do well at the box office when it was initially released. Most people don’t want to sit through its lengthy artistic sequences, the lack of dialogue and the slow moving plot. Space Odyssey isn’t a movie a piece of art.

4PM — Films written by Larry David are sadly just long Curb-Your-Enthusiasm episodes: In one scene his character is brutally honest, other people can’t take it and it backfires. Larry tries to rectify the situation and it only gets him deeper into trouble. It’s funny for a while but after eleven seasons of Curb we’ve seen enough. I still think the world would be a better place if we were all more like Larry David’s characters.

5PM — Rewatched The Big Lebowski for the umpteenth time. I can sing the all songs and know, with perfect timing, when to say “Shut the fuck up Donny.” Unlike other stoner movies with absurd story lines and plenty catch phrases that I’ve grown to love during my time at university, The Big Lebowski has aged well.

8AM — Emily has plenty reason to become a criminal: Student-loan debt, soul-crushing working conditions as a contractor with no worker’s rights, the prospect of an unpaid internship, a criminal record preventing her from landing any proper jobs—all very relatable and well-represented by Aubrey Plaza. But the film falls a bit flat with its anticlimactic story line.

6PM — In 1999, around the film’s release, Philip French wrote about Pleasantville for the Observer:

After a Hitlerian orgy of book-burning, the destruction of decadent art and notices saying ‘No Coloureds’ have appeared in shop windows, they draw up a code of conduct to restrict change and keep everyone and everything in its place. At this point, the film becomes a deadly serious fable about the current conflict between the free-thinking liberal heirs of the Sixties and the right-wing adherents of family values and religious fundamentalism who wish to restore an innocent prelapsarian America that never really existed.

It seems, 24 years later, Pleasantville is more relevant than ever.

4PM — A Good Person got ripped apart by some critics, but it’s a decent movie. Sure it’s a little schmaltzy here and there, but so are other, highly-decorated movies.

9AM — When a movie heavily relies on special effects and excessive martial arts, I sometimes ask a question: What is left of the film when the effects and the fighting are gone? What’s left if there’s only the story and dialogues between the characters? In “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” we find ourselves in a chaotic world full of opportunities, and yet here we are, estranged from our children, struggling to make ends meet. But with a little love and affection and kindness everything becomes more manageable. It’s as if the Headspace guy made a movie. Would that it were so simple.

12PM — Bill Murray as Hunter S Thompson—what a match, or so I thought. I was wrong. Where the Buffalo Roam is just a couple of weird, random episodes where the only connection is the two main characters: Thompson and his lawyer Lazlo. Thompson consulted the production and Neil Young contributed the soundtrack—neither could save this film.

4PM — “White Noise” isn’t a bad movie, but it’s not great either. And while I prefer odd and quirky movies over one that’s too serious any day, I can’t shake the feeling that Noah Baumbach tried a little too hard to make a film that feels different; to me, it feels borderline self-indulgent.

Interestingly, the trailer shows only scenes from the second act, the “airborne toxic event,” which is the strongest part of the film. Following a freak train accident, a great panic ensues once the toxic cloud reaches town. Families are scrambling to get their things together to escape the poisonous threat. The authorities aren’t prepared, treating the issue as an emergency drill, while looking for an effective emergency response. Some are worried about getting sick, others are frantically following the news. And then, as if nothing happened, the family is back at home, living their lives, not a single word about the previous live-threatening and -upending crisis. It sounds all very familiar when you look back at the last three years. In a time of crisis humans are more susceptible to group-think and conspiracies. Depicting the absurdity of it all is the one thing “White Noise” does really well.

8AM — Sad record-store-owner dad starts a band with his about-to-go-to-college daughter. Makes you want to stop writing code for a living and open a record store instead so you can drink and smoke behind the counter and become the knowledgeable and slightly condescending purveyor of fine music you always wanted to be.

5PM — Mulholland Drive makes very little sense when you first watch it. While the first part is told linearly, the story becomes confusing towards the end when events contradict previous ones. Very David Lynch. Watching Mulholland Drive twice helps. But if you, like me, generally struggle to make sense of art that is a little less straightforward, an explainer can help, like this one from LondonCityGirl:

Mulholland Drive is a very clever film.

5PM — Beats feels like a visit to a good club somewhere in Europe: A old warehouse, a bit rough, a bit smelly, trenched in spilled booze from countless parties, and a pretty good time. There, a couple is making out in a corner.

5PM — The Triangle of Sadness one of the movies that are incredibly good but don’t get much public recognition. I had never heard of it before a friend suggested it to me.

It’s set on a cruise for the very rich and the very detached from the real world. Being used to everyone dancing to their tune, their world is turned upside down when a storm hits during a captain’s dinner. The dinner ends with the drunk captain’s recital of socialist philosophy through the ship’s intercom and a seemingly never-ending barrage of guests throwing up that could well have originated from the Family Guy writers room. Funnily, now the crew is in control, both of their bodies and the situation.

The film paints a comic picture of rich people that do very little for the world beyond taking shots for Instagram or producing grenades, but who are useless without the help of underpaid servants around them.

1PM — A dutch video game developer, a greedy media mogul from England, the Soviet KGB, and the inventor of Tetris all get entangled in a wild story of politics, backstabbing, and contract breaching to secure the distribution rights of the game. I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected; it’s an entertaining film with a dense plot, fun and gripping.

The depiction of a country behind the iron curtain, here it’s the Soviet Union, follows a familiar pattern: Filmed using a filter that taints everything in a cold, blue hue, the landscape devoid of any colour, and there are never any trees. Here’s a surprising fact for American film makers from Southern California: We did have summers before 1989 and sunshine, lush green landscapes, even trees in cities.

10AM — After their father’s death, two estranged brothers reconnect whilst getting drunk in their childhood home. In between old memorabilia, they come across a plan they forged as teenagers: To travel across the country on their mopeds from the Black Forest in the south to the Baltic Sea in the north. Still intoxicated, they put the plan into action.

For many Germans growing up in the province, their moped is the segway to teenage independence. And so is planning a ridiculously long trip on a two-wheel vehicle that can’t go faster than 25 kilometres per hour. 25km/h depicts this and other nuggets of German life beautifully. Scores of beautiful nature, a wine fest, eating Sauerbraten, a feast at a Greek restaurant that every 17-year-old dreams of before they venture out and taste actually good food, and the petty-minded world of permanent camping—it’s all so German, it’s no surprise why so many Germans have ambivalent feelings about the country. And yet, it’s all lovingly staged in 25km/h that it left me thinking whether I should book a flight home to spend the summer there.

8PM — Making money at the expense of others is so deeply rooted in the American identity that anyone who raises the slightest concern against the idea, who argues for a fairer distribution of wealth, is immediately ousted as a socialist or, worse, a communist. As if wanting your peers to be able to eat, live in a house and see a doctor—to live a life in dignity—is a bad thing. Whenever a US government attempts to implement measures that would redistribute some wealth from the top to those who have a lot less, some old bloke who hasn’t worked a proper job in years, maybe never, goes onto Fox News and screams, “Socialists! I earned it, so it’s mine.”

It happens now, and it happened then, some seventy years ago, when Dalton Trumbo and nine other screenwriters and actors, the Hollywood 10, were blacklisted from working in Tinseltown because they wanted to live in a fairer country. Trumbo was forced to write under pseudonyms and leave his admittedly very decadent home. What comrade has a private pond? He continued to write bangers and won Oscars he couldn’t accept. Trumbo was later rehabilitated.

I liked Trumbo because I like period movies. But also because it tells an important story about one of humanity’s persistent flaws: That different voices need to be listened to even if you don’t like their sound.

2PM — Let’s get one thing out of the way. Dating a seventeen-year-old is wrong. Dating a seventeen-year-old when you’re forty-two is even worse. A movie like Manhattan would not be made today, especially since the whole dating-an-underaged issue is not addressed in the movie at all. Not one of Isaac’s friends finds the relationship shocking or points out that he might want to date a woman older than thirty.

I re-watched Manhattan after reading Khoi Vinh’s love letter to the film. Its cinematography is superb; the composition of scenes and the use of space seemingly putting actors on the sidelines of the screen is such an interesting way to shoot a movie. If you’re getting into filming or photography and looking for inspiration on composition, then watch Manhattan over and over again.

3PM — The Quiet Girl is the opposite of today’s movie zeitgeist: It’s quiet, it’s slow, it has no special effects, and it doesn’t try to create a vibe. It’s a great movie.

11AM — After an encounter with the police, a teenage rivalry ending in a death, misunderstood by their elders, three teenagers retreat to an abandoned mansion. The rival clique shows up to revenge their friend’s death, and then… To be honest, I don’t know how it ends. It watched this on a plane and fell asleep.

24-year-old James Dean, who looks 35, plays a confused teenager. Although some of them were still teenagers, the actors all look like they could be the parents of their characters. It’s all a bit surreal.

7AM — Imagine Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie teamed up to make Speed—you’d get Bullet Train. It has big-name cameos, bright colours, and many special effects—but in the end it’s dreary affair.

3AM — According to Letterboxd, Nick Cage appeared in 123 movies. I might have only seen a handful, and I don’t recall ever liking one. In The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Nick Cage plays Nick Cage, an actor whose career has stalled. He signs up for a gig to appear at a superfan’s birthday party, where he meets many people who celebrate the absolute legend he is. He gets into a kerfuffle with the CIA and has to channel all his Cageness to not blow the cover. All this is supposed to be self-deprecating, but it’s only very cringey. In one scene, Cage literally makes out with himself. I only managed to get halfway through the film until I turned it off.

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022). Director: Tom Gormican. Screenplay: Tom Gormican, Kevin Etten. Cast: Nick Cage, Pedro Pascal.

5AM — The Menu has all the ingredients of a whodunnit: A group of characters meet in a remote place and get locked in a room. Something feels off. Except nobody has died. Yet.

Luckily, The Menu isn’t one of the dreaded murder mysteries that are making a comeback at the moment—no it’s a parody of pretentious haute cuisine that often isn’t about the taste of food or even feeding people but about poncy concepts. Like clothing presented at fashion shows that nobody would ever wear off a catwalk.

The Menu (2022). Director: Mark Mylod. Screenplay: Seth Reiss, Will Tracy. Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Anya Taylor-Joy, Nicholas Hoult.

7AM — I like a good, old-fashioned comedy. Larry and Richard find Bernie’s body and cover up his death so they can enjoy their free weekend Bernie’s beach house in the Hamptons. Weekend at Bernie’s is ridiculous and silly, like Caddyshack or Three Amigos. Most people hate these kinds of films, but not me.

Weekend at Bernie’s (1989). Director: Ted Kotcheff. Cast: Andrew McCarthy, Jonathan Silverman, Catherine Mary Stewart, Terry Kiser.

9AM — The story in a nutshell: Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves), an FBI agent, infiltrates a group of surfers led by Bodhi (Patrick Swayze), who rob banks as their part-time job. There’s a girl too. People die.

Point Break has everything. Surfers who say things like, “It’s about us against the system. The system that kills the human spirit,” and policemen yelling, “I’ve been working on this case for three months.” Giving off strong 90s vibes, the movie’s highlights include two action-ridden chases: One by car with lots of drifting around corners and hubcaps flying all over the place, and another by foot that lasts ten minutes trashing several homes along the way and ending at the LA river.

Spoiler alert. Point Break’s conclusion neatly ties the film together. The good guy gets the girl. After a short chicken fight on an Australian beach, Utah handcuffs Bodhi but lets him go to ride a once-in-a-lifetime wave, never to be seen again. Utah then throws his badge into the sea; he’s no longer a man of the law; he’s a surfer now. The fitting end reveals what this movie is: An unintentional comedy.

Point Break (1991). Director: Kathryn Bigelow. Cast: Patrick Swayze, Keanu Reeves, Lori Petty, Gary Busey.

8PM — Shirley is a good film. It’s sophisticated but not pretentious, it’s entertaining but not shallow.

Shirley (2020). Director: Josephine Decker. Cast: Elisabeth Moss, Odessa Young, Michael Stuhlbarg, Logan Lerman.

10AM — I rewatched Natural Born Killers about 20 years after seeing it for the first time, and it didn’t age well. The glorification of violence and celebration of inept role models is an apt depiction of nineties media, still relevant today. But the MTV-style camera angles, the filters, the fast-paced cuts—all things that make this movie stand out to a twenty-year-old, now are exhausting, annoying even.

Natural Born Killers (1994). Director: Oliver Stone. Cast: Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis, Robert Downey Jr.

5PM — An idealistic presidential candidate and his even more idealistic campaign manager. Both sleep with the same intern. One impregnates the intern, and the other loses his job over the affair.

The Ides of March is strutted with stars, but the plot just hums along until the movie ends. There’s no real climax, no surprises. Politics is full of intrigue and backstabbing. In this day and age, who would have thought that politicians and their aides betray their values, foremost integrity and honesty, to stay in the game?

The Ides of March (2011). Director: George Clooney. Cast: Ryan Gosling, George Clooney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, Evan Rachel Wood.

6PM — Bert Trautmann came to England as a prisoner of war after World War II. After his release, he got signed by Manchester City in 1949, where he went on to play more than 500 matches. He won the FA Cup with City in 1956 after breaking his neck and continuing to play for another 15 minutes until the final whistle.

The Keeper doesn’t do this incredible story justice, and it can’t. The movie focuses a lot on overcoming resistance to his background in the German Army, on and off the pitch, and personal setbacks. As a football follower and former goalkeeper, I would have loved to see how his many performances on the pitch shaped his image amongst the English people, which would be far easier in a documentary.

The Keeper (2019). Director: Marcus H. Rosenmüller. Cast: David Kross, Freya Mavor, John Henshaw.

2PM — The Father, at times, is as confusing as it must feel when you’re experiencing dementia. The world around you changes incoherently, and there’s no way to explain the events rationally.

The Father (2020). Director: Florian Zeller. Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Olivia Colman.

11PM — An unimpressive film. I fiddled way too much with my phone while watching.

Manhattan Night (2016). Director: Brian DeCubellis. Cast: Adrien Brody, Yvonne Strahowski, Campbell Scott.

7AM — Your typical Baz Luhrmann film: Grandiose visuals but a little boring.

Elvis (2022). Director: Baz Luhrmann. Cast: Tom Hanks, Austin Butler.

5AM — Two men are dropped on an island to work on a lighthouse, initially for four weeks. A storm hits, and they have to stay longer, much longer. Or do they? As one of them battles with the weather, loneliness and his counterpart, reality becomes increasingly distorted.

The Lighthouse is the kind of movie you watch fully engaged, beginning to end. You really want to like it because this isn’t your average Hollywood blockbuster. It’s shot in black and white at an odd aspect ratio. There’s no music score, only the distant, haunting sound of a fog horn. Willem Defoe’s and Robert Pattison’s acting is superb. But when the film ends, you walk away thinking, “what was all this about?”

The Lighthouse (2019). Director: Robert Eggers. Cast: Willem Defoe, Robert Pattison.

12PM — This is the story of three friends from New York City, the story of the Beastie Boys—told by the Beastie Boys. Micheal Diamond and Adam Horowitz, live on stage at the Kings Theatre in Brooklyn, New York, are recalling significant events from their 30-year career. How they started as a punk rock band (everyone was in a punk rock band), how they got into rap (everyone got into rap in New York in the 1980s), how they met Rick Rubin and Russel Simmons (Rick Rubin had the equipment they needed for a gig). Moving to California, trying to leave behind “Fight For Your Right,” and finally becoming proper musicians.

As you’d expect, their story is hilarious and a little crazy. But Diamond and Horowitz are well into their fifties now; they have grown up. Between the stories of juvenile silliness and lousy decision-making, there’s also much introspection. Both take significant time to reflect on how they treated former band members before the Beastie Boys broke out and the sexist lyrics they wrote; that it was the late Adam Yauch who shaped the Beastie Boys into grown-up artists and humans.

8AM — This was fun and heart-warming. Taika Waititi’s films are always a joy; funny but not silly, quirky but never pretentious.

Hunt For The Wilderpeople (2016). Director: Taika Waititi. Cast: Julian Dennison, Sam Neill.

5PM — I’m usually apprehensive about films that were both heavily awarded and the talk of the town amongst critics. Often it means the movie is just dull. But Parasite was fantastic.

Parasite (2019). Director: Bong Joon Ho. Cast: Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong. Currently streaming on SBS On Demand in Australia.

8AM — We all had this idea at least once while slightly intoxicated: Wouldn’t it be nice always to feel like you’re a bit drunk, to be more confident, less introverted and less anxious? Four adults in Another Round are taking the idea to the test. It’s all fun and games until someone becomes an alcoholic.

Another Round (2020). Director: Thomas Vinterberg. Cast: Mads Mikkelsen, Thomas Bo Larsen, Magnus Millang, Lars Ranthe. Currently streaming on SBS On Demand in Australia.

5PM — I loved the slow pace of Causeway and its subdued vibe, but the story is too thin. Two traumatised people meet, then hang out drinking beer and getting high. That’s it; that’s the whole plot.

7PM — Tschick, the book, isn’t Wolfgang Herrndorf’s best work. And Tschick, the film, isn’t Fatih Akin’s best work either. I’d love to see Akin turn the lonely atmosphere of in In Plüschgewittern into a movie or the Coen brother’s take on a wild ride like Sand.

Tschick is still a good, heart-warming film about two fourteen-year-olds spending a summer on a road trip, having the time of their lives. It’s easy-going and fun, and I felt a bit homesick after watching it. I wonder if anyone who hasn’t lived in Germany would get all the references.

9AM — An entertaining, quirky, and fast-paced whodunnit set in the 1930s against the backdrop of a conspiracy to overthrow the government and install a dictator backed by wealthy businessmen. Sounds utterly familiar, doesn’t it? The big reveal falls a bit flat, though.

This was the first time in three years I went to a cinema. Watching a movie on a big screen with good sound is just different from sitting on the sofa at home, fiddling with the phone. The experience may have influenced my rating.

10AM — An early one from the Coen brothers, and it has precisely the ludicrous characters that you would expect.

2PM — The Greatest Beer Run Ever is a decent movie, but it’s not great. A lighthearted movie, ideal for a quiet Friday night in with a beer and a curry.