Letterboxd — Your life in film

“Don’t let the librul media tell you how to think and feel!”

As long as Netflix continues to deliver big dumb action movies with mostly-nonsense plots, I will continue watching them.

Impressed as much by the fact that Gerwig pulled this off as I am by the form and subject matter of the film.

More movies should be a meticulous chronicle of how an assassin plans to kill their target.

There’s something very 90s about this movie. Maybe it’s the fact that it begins on a Russian submarine or that it has an extended chase through a European city or that its villain represents an imagined threat to American military and economic hegemony. Either way, it feels like a throwback and I’m not complaining. Not the strongest of the Mission: Impossible sequels but a great time at the movies all the same.

I don’t know I rated this so low (3 and a half stars) the last time I saw it. This movie fucks! It rules. One of De Palma’s best.

It is very funny to me that this dark and archly-cynical social satire ends on the conviction that if one simply gives the right knowledge to the right authorities, you can achieve something like justice. Good movie though!

I think the final sequences of this movie — of Truman struggling against the wind and waves and currents to reach the freedom of the vast unknown — stand as some of the most powerful filmmaking of the 1990s. Those scenes are a potent representation of the internal strife and turmoil inherent to the struggle for self-liberation, leading to one of the most truthful conclusions I’ve ever seen from a Hollywood film: that as difficult as it is to attain, freedom only marks the beginning of the journey to self-knowledge.

4K UHD

I don’t need a Mortal Kombat movie to be good, I just need it not to be boring, and this was boring as hell.

Basically Top Gun: Maverick starring Jimmy Stewart. A mostly just serviceable screenplay provides the bones for some pretty majestic shots of high-altitude flight. And, like so many military-themed films of this period, there’s a real ambivalence toward the institution and the demands it makes on soldiers and their families. Not the best of the Mann/Stewart collaborations but a perfectly solid way to spend two hours on a Sunday afternoon (or whenever you decide to watch it, I don’t know your life).

I’ve seen this a million times and I have no original thoughts on it so here I’ll just note that the recent 4K transfer looks great except for a single scene where, it seems, they didn’t have high quality footage to use.

Also happy to report that this is the director’s cut, which contains a great scene where Christopher Lambert shoots the shit out of a Nazi.

Maybe it’s because of my training as a columnist and magazine writer, but when I watch movies, I often look for the underlying question of the film. What, exactly, is it trying to answer? 

I think the question of TINA is: “What kind of woman could possibly survive the life she had?” And I think the answer it gives is: “A woman so strong that even her powerful voice only captures a fraction of the strength she holds.”

RIP to a truly remarkable human being.