Earlier today, I wrote a review of the second season of Severance where I mentioned how hard it is to follow up on a stellar first take on an idea. I was really nervous about this sequel in the same way, but it really works!

Kiddo somewhat begrudgingly admitted she liked the first movie enough for us to watch this one over the long weekend. It was great! I have been giggling about Ben Reilly jokes for the past 24 hours. I also love how Reilly looks like he’s from a 90s comic book, and the whole movie does a good job of following up with the creative blend of animation styles (the LEGO joke was fine, but the Da Vinci Vulture was fun, as was the “-Ed.” joke, which I’m surprised they didn’t use in the first one.

I understand why this movie is well-regarded, and if I were watching it from the perspective of someone seeing it for the first time in 1991 (which I couldn’t have, because I was 3 and from a no-R-rated-movies Mormon family), I might have different thoughts.

Instead, though, I noticed all the obvious ADR, I learned the context for all the lines I already know from playground conversations and pop culture osmosis, I shrugged at the over-the-top action, and I thought about how much more banal the threats of AI are these days than Skynet and a T-1000. It was a real meh for me.

Look, to enjoy this film, I had to set aside a lot of concerns about the glorification of war and violence, uncritical U.S. patriotism, and more besides. I did set those (mostly) aside, though, and it’s a fun, well-done movie. I wish there were more Stellan Skarsgård (the actor) in it, but I really enjoyed Jerry Westerby (the character from another franchise) popping up as the Soviet ambassador.

Top Gun is probably the better movie, but if I had to watch one US Navy aviation recruitment video dressed up as a blockbuster film, I think I’d pick this one. It wrestles with more interesting ideas, and more of it happens on a carrier, which is fun.

And yet, I am annoyed by two things that I recognize stand in tension with each other: 1) the jingoistic “look how cool our war toys are” vibes and 2) the shaggy dog nature of the story that ultimately rules out showing off those war toys and doesn’t do anything with the time travel premise that a short story couldn’t do better.

This movie is a pure delight, and I’m glad I talked kiddo into watching it with me. Maybe it’s time to finally watch the sequel after three years of meaning to but never getting around to it.

I hate a dumb movie, but I love a movie that is so intentionally dumb that it loops right around to genius. There are excellent jokes of all kinds in here—from riffs on video games to subtle musical jokes—and even if I could have done without an “Indian fur trader” character, I’m hard pressed to find anything (else) that gave me pause in this movie. I wish I hadn’t watched it on my phone while doing chores, because I’m sure I would have gotten even more out of it on a full screen.

This movie is well done, and Turing is a figure I’d love to learn more about, but I got the sense that these two observations were in tension with each other. In short, I’m so annoyed at how obviously the history has been made (and changed) to conveniently fit a movie that I can’t enjoy what is not a bad film otherwise.

A deserved masterpiece that I enjoyed watching despite much that’s aged—some things were just out of date while others were more problematic.

Kiddo and I went to go see this at the library, and in the few minutes before they actually hit play, whoever was running the event played some of the Blu-ray special features to tide us over. One of them was about all of the “easter eggs” we were going to see in the movie. This annoyed me a bit, because if I’d heard one thing about the movie, it’s that it was stuffed full of (perhaps gratuitous) Nintendo references, and I don’t think it’s an “easter egg” if the movie is built around hitting you over the head with reference after reference after reference.

I get why this film is beloved! It also did not crack me up the way I was hoping.

Look, there were good parts to this movie, including jokes that made me laugh and scenes that made me tear up. It just seems weird to feel continuity lockout from a Toy Story movie (never having seen the fourth one), and that made me wonder if this movie needed to exist.

What’s more, I have a rule of thumb that good tech criticism in fiction needs to target the companies as much as the computers, and this fails that test. While the movie stops short of moral panic (and intentionally so), it gets close, and critiques that could be good feel a bit shallow and obvious to me.

Grandma and Grandpa suggested we all take kiddo to go see this over the long weekend. Spouse was skeptical, but I was excited—we’d apparently had very different impressions of the trailer.

Anyway, it’s not a deep cinematic work, and you can see some of the seams (I assumed some of them were due to an overly faithful adaptation of the book, but after reading the book summary on Wikipedia, I’m less sure), but I really enjoyed it. It’s trope-y in a meta way that works, it was fun and funny, and even my skeptical spouse was won over by the joke about “eating God on Sundays,” which had her in tears.

Watched this with spouse over two nights. It wasn’t the movie that we expected (I’m not familiar with the source material, and the trailer feels selectively edited in hindsight), but I have some (perhaps begrudging) respect for it?

I don’t like the characters, I don’t love the plot, and I’m not sure I enjoyed the movie, but it feels like it really knew the vibes it was going for, and I feel like it succeeded there. I like a movie that knows what it wants to be and doesn’t mind being weird along the way, and this fit that bill.

I’ve now reviewed the original (audio)book as well as radio, tv, and film adaptations! Wondering if there are more adaptations worth looking at.

This movie isn’t bad, but I found myself disappointed with it. I don’t know if you can trim the story down to two hours (though now I’m wondering what the radio play comes out to), and while I try not to grump about adaptations, I’ve got a list of decisions I didn’t agree with here.

Excellent adaptation of a book I remember enjoying. My “book is better” brain wanted to quibble with some choices, but I think those choices made sense when considering the change of medium. I also really, really appreciated the almost-throwaway joke about the Phantom Zone.

I like what this movie is trying to be, but it’s so committed to gags, a breakneck pace, and a certain amount of self-defeating essentialism that I don’t think it ever gets there.

Il est sympa ce film ! Il est émouvant tout en faisant rire aussi. J’avoue qu’avec un oeil plus critique, je trouverais des choses qui me gênent (d’abord, il n’est pas hyper féministe comme film, et puis on préfère une histoire « feel-good » au lieu d’interroger les relations entre les hyper riches et les immigrés pauvres), mais c’est vraiment un film qui me plaît et qui me permet d’apprendre un français un peu plus courant que ce que j’ai appris pendant mes études.

Bon, d’abord j’avoue que c’est difficile d’évaluer un film de 2002 sachant tout ce qui est maintenant connu sur Depardieu et Dieudonné (entre autres), mais je mets tout ça à côté pour ce post.

Je voulais regarder ce film parce que je savais qu’il est (était?) bien aimé des Français de ma génération. Je le trouve amusant et une bonne adaptation du sens d’humour des albums Astérix. Comme avec Les visiteurs, il y a beaucoup de blagues qui sont difficile à traduire, mais j’ai eu moins de mal avec ce film-ci.

Not a perfect movie but a really fun one. I appreciate a lot of the choices that went into this (techbro Lex Luthor, bowl cut Nathan Fillion, Hall of Justice in Cincinnati Union Station), and I look forward to seeing what else this iteration of Superman movies comes up with.

J’ai des souvenirs très précis du monent où un ami Suisse m’a conseillé ce film et m’a fort déconseillé la version américaine. Cette conversation a eu lieu il y a 17 ans, et je suis enfin arrivé à regarder le film.

Bon, je crois que je ne suis pas suffisamment français (ou bien francophone, si c’est un Suisse qui me l’a recommandé) pour apprécier le film. J’avoue que le regarder en faisant la vaisselle ne fait pas meilleure impression, et j’assume. Pourtant, bien que je me débrouille assez bien en français, j’ai plus du mal à comprendre le dialogue d’un film qu’une conversation face à face. En plus, les sous-titres en anglais n’aidaient pas trop, et je n’avais pas le choix de les mettre en français. Il y a plein de blagues qui ne se traduisent pas bien, et j’ai attendu la moitié du film avant de comprendre la blague Jacquouille, Jacques Ouilles, M. Ouille, qui est assez marrant en fin de compte.

Il me semble que parmi les Français, ce film est aussi bien aimé que le premier, mais je trouve que je l’aime beaucoup moins bien, moi.

Il y a des trucs drôles dans le film, mais je le trouve trop compliqué. Ce qui est pire, c’est que c’est bien difficile d’avoir un héros aussi raciste mais sans pourrir le film même. À mon avis, on réussit à trouver l’équilibre juste dans le premier film, mais dans ce film, on ajoute des assassins chinois avec des accents impénétrables, et on commence à se demander si ce n’est pas eux la blague au lieu de Hubert.

Comme je suis en train de reregarder Au service de la France, l’idée m’est venue que je devrais aussi revisiter les films OSS 117.

Ce film est stupide mais assume sa stupidité en s’en moquant. Le héros est encore plus stupide mais ne le reconnaît pas du tout. Bref, c’est un film parfait pour mon sens d’humour. Le rire de Jean Dujardin me fait rire moi aussi, et il est tellement doué dans ce rôle.

I don’t remember liking the first Knives Out all that much, but the second and third felt like they were made just for me. It’s religious, it doesn’t pull any punches against toxic religion, it’s funny, and it has interesting characters. So glad I watched.

After months of pestering her about it, kiddo relented and agreed to watch the original Star Wars with me (which I will always know as ANH even if I complain about special edition changes, so I guess that’s where I am on the Star Wars purity scale or whatever).

I haven’t watched this in maybe a decade? I noticed the seams and flaws in the movie more than I ever have before, but I can’t not give it full marks for the world that it created. It was interesting to think about all the different directions the not-yet-franchise could have taken after this movie and how many of them I might have liked to see, even if I am a Star Wars canon nerd even to this day.

Cory Doctorow has a bit he returns to in a lot of his writing about how tech billionaires aren’t geniuses, just power-hungry people who got lucky, and now I will always wonder if he got it from this movie. I’m a huge fan of Cory’s, but Rian Johnson’s having Daniel Craig rant about how dumb Edward Norton’s tech billionaire character is in this movie is perfection.

Also, super good cameo appearance by The Verge.