Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Expend4bles 2023

  ★★ Watched 02 Dec 2023

  I'm not sure why I've watched four of these--I'm not sure why they've *made* four of these. I do like the ingenuity of getting around a slashed budget by setting most of it on a ship. The ending is curiously, grimly misanthropic, with an Expendable admitting he straight-up murdered an innocent guy and pausing for audience laughter before "The Boys Are Back In Town" cues up on the soundtrack. I don't really know what to say except this is the second time this week I've heard Fiddy's "p.i.m.p." in a movie, and the other one was French.

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  The Courtship of Andy Hardy 1942

  ★★½ Watched 29 Nov 2023

  These Andy Hardy movies are inventing the form of episodic television before TV actually exists--which is fascinating in and of itself, but sometimes they don't feel like proper feature films: too busy, too scattershot, too uneventful. This one has a fairly original dilemma at its core--as a favour to his father the Judge, Andy starts dating a wallflower turned bombshell (a gorgeous Donna Reed) who's embroiled in her parents' custody battle, and he can't figure out why he's just not…

Popular reviews

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  Star Trek Into Darkness 2013

  ½ Watched 16 May 2013 19

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  I hate this movie for all its cutesy quoting of Wrath of Khan while trying and spectacularly failing to sublet its gravitas. I hate it for casting the whitest actor on Earth as a man named Khan Noonien Singh. I hate it for the way that every shot in the back half is a three-ring circus of lens flares, cluttered sets, and CGI embellishments. I hate it for turning Spock into Sheldon from "The Big Bang Theory". I hate it…

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  Failure to Launch 2006

  ★★ Watched 29 May 2018

  Kathy Bates has this beautiful moment at the end of the film where she worries about living alone with her husband of 35+ years for the first time in decades "because what if he doesn't like me?" It made me angry that I'd spent the last 100 minutes watching this movie instead of that one.